Defect management and recording quality
Another major advantage of DVD+RW format over DVD-RW (although no drive support it yet) is hardware defect management provided by the DVD+MRW standard (Mt Rainier for DVD+RW). On a DVD+MRW disc, when an error occur during a read or write access to an ECC block, this block is flagged as bad and the drive will not use it any more. Instead, when writing to the disc, data which should have been stored in this bad block are relocated elsewhere ; likewise, when the drive is asked to read these data again, it will fetch them from the new location. These operations are completely transparent for any software (whatever operating system, driver or burning application is used), and while the initiator is requesting consecutive sectors the drive will actually read data from various locations : this new abstraction layer is called Logical to Physical address translation.
As a side note, popular belief is that defect management is only useful when burning new discs (where data which are being written can also be read back, checked and moved to another location if needed), but that it is helpless on discs which get damaged after they have been burned. This is wrong, because when an ECC block is partially damaged and requires several retries to be read (or for instance give too many PI/PO errors), these data can proactively be moved to another clean location on the disc before media wear-out makes them unreadable. Of course, if an ECC block is damaged beyond error correction capabilities, data are definitely lost ; however, only very serious damages can make such a thing happen, as PI/PO correction can handle burst errors larger than 6 mm.
As with formatting, DVD+RW standard enables background verifications, i.e. the disc is checked for defects when the drive is idle. Of course, at any time the user can still read or write to the disc, or eject it from the drive ; background verification would then resume later from where it was stopped. Combining these features together gives a very powerful system which can continuously try to improve the longevity of discs : while the user performs its usual operations, the drive can check in the background the complete surface of the disc and move data from damaged locations to clean areas. Such advanced use of defect management are already described in the DVD+MRW specification, for instance with the Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART, a technology inspired from hard discs). Finally, it is important to mention that DVD+MRW provides full read-only compatibility for players which don't understand MRW.
Although DVD-R(W) also support some defect management (Persistent-DM and DRT-DM), it is mainly software based and actions must always be initiated by a specific program. Furthermore, since DVD-RW format lacks the needed structures, address translation has to be performed also by software, and translation tables have to be stored on the user area of the disc according to a higher level specification (for instance in the sparing tables of UDF 2.0). This makes DVD-RW not well suited for simple file storage or image burning, as it requires a complete file system to benefit from defect management. Note also that although DVD-RW cannot use +MRW technology (due to technical differences), DVD+RW can very well use UDF 2.0.
Also a DVD+R(W) disc allows a drive to achieve better writing quality (independently of media quality), because it gives more information to a drive than a DVD-R(W). Indeed, just like with CD-R(W), the best writing settings for a given disc are found at startup during the OPC (Optimum Power Control) algorithm, which use data contained in the pre-pits blocks/ADIP words. And regarding OPC, a DVD+R(W) gives not only more information (e.g. power dependency on wavelength) but also more precise ones (e.g. startup laser power). Moreover, all these information are available for 4 different speed ranges (primary and upper speeds, normal and 4x+ mode), while - format only provides one set of data. This is very important because optimal writing settings are very sensitive to burning speeds. Also the OPC test area of DVD+ is 32768 sectors in total, compared to 7088 sectors for DVD-.
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