DVD-ROM drives v. DVD-RAM disks

[rhofland at fastdial.net (Randall Hofland)]

    Question: Do most of the newer DVD-ROM drives (8X and faster) also
read the DVD-RAM disks?
    I am planning on building some file servers to hold photographic
image files and wish to load the files onto DVD disks rather than be
limited to the smaller capacity of CD-ROMs. I would like to do this
using a DVD-RAM drive for burning the disks but then use multiple low
cost DVD-ROM drives for the upload tasks. How will this work under Linux
or OpenBSD?
    This would allow me to have upwards of 50G of DVD capacity on a
relatively low cost server with eleven exposed 5.25" bays. While hard
drive costs are probably lower and certainly faster overall (so they
would be used for swap space and overall caching), I do want a stable
medium to write to and then easily swap in or out as needed. It looks to
me that DVD-RAM is the best option so far.

Does this sound like a good solution, or am I really better off burning
a ton of CD-ROMs and then uploading the files to big harddrives for the
actual server storage? After all, I can get 18G U3W drives for little
more than $100 and much bigger ATA/100 drives for not much more. What I
don't want is a bunch of useless CD coasters or gigs of lost data.


Thanks in advance


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