From around 1999 to 2003 DVD-RAM cartridges were an affordable and high-capacity option for data storage. This was before USB so all of the drives were either SCSI or IDE. They worked similar to a hard drive where data could be written and erased with ease unlike a write-once CDR or even a CD-RW that requires special software. DVD-RAM media could just mount on the desktop to be read or written to. They have spiral sector markers that are visible on the disk unlike other popular optical data formats. Similar to MiniDisc, they were an optical format that could be written to and erased 1000s of times. The disk were housed inside cartridges or caddy since they could be double sided and the cartridges would protect the disk surface from fingerprints and dust. Some of the cartridge cases allowed the disks to be removed so they could be placed in a more common optical drive tray, but others styles were not removable. The DVD-RAM drives had a square shaped tray that the disk would lay in. They held either 4.7GB or 5.2GB per side. They could have one side or two side, similar to a cassette tape or DVD movie disk that would require it to be flipped manually. By 2004 USB removal hard drives and flash storage would make DVD-RAM a less convenient format to work with, but the DVD-R format persisted which did not use the cartridges.
We specialize the the transfer and retrieval of files for the Tascam MX-2424 Hard Disk Recorder DVD-RAM disks, Mac OS HFS formatted DVD-RAM disks created in Mac OS 8.6, OS9.x, and OSX 10.0.x to 10.5.x but should also be able to read Windows/FAT32 and UFD DVD-RAM disks. If you have a Pro Tools session on a disk we can retrieve it and convert the SD2 files to .wav for use in a modern DAW.