Mount Rainier (packet writing)
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Optical disc authoring
Image:MtRainier logo.jpg Mount Rainier is an optical disc file system that adds packet writing to the Universal Disk Format (UDF). Its purpose is the replacement of the floppy disk. It is named after Mount Rainier, a mountain near Seattle, Washington, USA.
Mount Rainier can be used only with drives that explicitly support it. It does not require special media, however; it can work with all rewritable CD and DVD media.
With the Universal Disk Format, it is already possible to use CD-RW discs like a floppy disk, but this is achieved by the use of specialized writing software. Mount Rainier will be independent from any Operating System as it is completely hardware-based. The time needed for the formatting of the disk is shortened to about one minute by the background formatting capabilities of the drive. Furthermore, the new standard allocates some sectors at the end of the disk for defect management. Defect sectors are recorded at a table in the lead-in (an administrative area) and in a copy of the table in the lead-out. The format also allows DVD+RW to be used in a similar manner.
Mount Rainier will be implemented natively in Windows Vista, which is scheduled to release at the beginning of 2007. Already, the latest Linux distros support Mount Rainier natively. Operating systems that don't support it need third party software to read and write in Mount Rainier format.
Image:EasyWrite.jpg The EasyWrite logo is the marketing symbol for CD drives that are Mount Rainier compatible. The logo was created by Philips to ensure that products using the logo were tested and verified for quality.
The Mt. Rainier specification allows a user to drag and drop data within seconds after insertion and spin-up of a writable disk while a background formatting sequence is taking place. Before this technology, a user would have to wait for the complete formatting of the CD-RW to complete before writing any data to a new disk.
CD-MRW stands for Compact Disc – Mount Rainier Read/Write.
External links
- Homepage of the Mount Rainier standard
- Mount Rainier Support in Linux
- Understanding CD-R & CD-RWde:Mount Rainier (Technik)
