Packet writing (or incremental packet writing, IPW) is an optical disc recording technology used to allow write-once and rewritable CD and

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

media to be used in a similar manner to a

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

from within the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

Details

Packet writing allows users to create, modify, and delete files and directories on demand without the need to ''

burn A burn is an injury to skin, or other tissues, caused by heat, electricity, chemicals, friction, or ionizing radiation (such as sunburn, caused by ultraviolet radiation). Most burns are due to heat from hot fluids (called scalding), soli ...

'' a whole disc. Packet writing technology achieves this by writing data in incremental blocks rather than in a single block. Deleting files and directories of a

CD-R CD-R (Compact disc-recordable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can only be Write once read many, written once and read arbitrarily many times. CD-R discs (CD-Rs) ...

using packet writing technology does not recover the space occupied by these objects but, rather, they are simply marked as being deleted (making them effectively ''hidden''). Similarly, changes to files cause new instances to be created instead of replacing the original files. Because of this, the available space on a non-rewritable medium using packet writing technology will decrease every time its content is modified. The most common file system for packet writing systems is UDF. Due to the characteristics of optical rewritable media such as

CD-RW RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, r ...

s and

DVD-RW DVD recordable and DVD rewritable are a collection of optical disc formats that can be written to by a DVD recorder and by computers using a DVD writer. The "recordable" discs are write-once read-many (WORM) media, where as "rewritable" discs a ...

s, the ability of data sectors to hold their contents diminishes when changing them frequently (since re-crystallized alloy de-crystallizes). To cope with this the packet writing system can remap bad sectors with good sectors as required. These bad sectors cannot be recovered by formatting the media.''"PC Hardware in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference"'' by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson − Chapter 11 (starting page 340): CD writers
/ref>

Software

Packet writing is most popularly implemented by Microsoft since

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

, where it is referred to as the Live File System. Software implementing packet writing includes: * Nero InCD * Drive Letter Access *

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

(since 2.6.8)

References

{{hardware-stub Optical disc authoring Optical computer storage media