Mount Rainier (packet writing)
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Mount Rainier (MRW) is a format for writable optical discs which provides the packet writing and defect management. Its goal is the replacement of the floppy disk. It is named after Mount Rainier, a volcano near Seattle, Washington, United States.
Mount Rainier can be used only with drives that explicitly support it (a part of
The physical format of MRW on the disk is managed by the drive's
Design
The time needed for the
From the host computer's perspective, an MRW disc provides a defect-free block-accessible device, upon which any host supported filesystem may be written. Such filesystems may be
Mt. Rainier allows write access to a disc within seconds after insertion and spin-up, even while a background formatting sequence is taking place. Before this technology, a user would have to wait for the formatting to complete before writing any data to a new disc. It is even possible to read (but not write) MRW disks without an MRW-compatible drive; A "remapper" device driver is needed, an example of which is EasyWrite Reader for Windows.
An alternative to MRW is to physically format a disc in UDF 1.5 or higher using the spared build. This is achieved by the use of specialized packet writing software, or operating systems that support UDF versions 1.5 and above. MRW capabilities overlap somewhat with that of UDF 1.5+.
Information about the exact format on disc is sparse. For a limited overview of the format on disc see.[2]
Advantages
Advantages of MRW over UDF 1.5+ include:
- fast background formatting of the media
- finer grained packet size of 2K versus 64K
- file system independence
- does not depend on the host system to perform defect management
Advantage of UDF 1.5+ over MRW include:
- more portable, as UDF 1.5+ alone does not need specialized drive hardware to write, and the computer needs neither an MRW driver for a MRW-capable optical drive nor an MRW reader for drives that are incapable of reading MRW natively, reducing software overhead.
Operating system support
Mount Rainier is implemented natively in
Some optical disc software, such as IsoBuster, can support Mount Rainier on non-MR drives.[4]
The EasyWrite logo is the marketing symbol created by Philips for CD drives that are Mount Rainier compatible.
CD-MRW stands for Compact disc – Mount Rainier Read/Write.
References
- ^ "Why DVD+R(W) is superior to DVD-R(W) - Myce.com". June 23, 2003. Retrieved 24 April 2017. (Reference describes DVD+MRW too.)
- ^ http://www.13thmonkey.org/documentation/DVD/dvdplusmrw.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Mueller, Scott (November 1, 2011). "Upgrading & Repairing PCs: Optical Storage". Que Publishing. Pearson Education. Retrieved June 18, 2015.
- ^ IsoBuster featurews page - "Support for Mount Rainier CD-RW and DVD+RW discs in MRW compatible and non-MRW compatible drives. Auto detection and automatic remapping which can be switched off or forced at all times. Built in MRW remapper / reader. (Built in Method 3 remapper)"