#51 VAT/sparing table support?

[Anonymous]

I'm concerned that normal UDF use will unevenly wear out discs and not handle defective sectors gracefully.

From gawking at Wikipedia I see that UDF specifies two variants that help deal with this.

1. VAT, or incremental writing, would allow WORM media to act somewhat like rewritable media (the main limitation that deleting files doesn't make that space available again), and on rewritable media would force a form of wear leveling where each sector only gets written to once for each formatting.

2. Sparing tables would allow bad blocks to be remapped on the fly, much like the Mount Ranier format which requires special hardware (that I don't have :-)

Documentation on these in Linux is hard to find, so I don't know if they are already fully supported or if there is room to add these as feature requests. I'm eager to use something like them.