Prices come down for high reliability DVD-RAM discs

I have been using DVD-RW discs for my backups for about a year and have been very disappointed at how many of them end up in the trash.
DVD-RAMs are said to be at least ten times more reliable as to the number of rewrites available and are used for archival grade storage.
They are essentially like very slow hard drives with their random-access read write capabilities. They are formatted before use which maps any out bad sectors. The in-store prices at Frys for 3x speed DVD-RAM discs are about double the cost of a DVD-RW at this writing (3/08) There is a nice wiki writeup with extra details and a Media Sciences white paper discussing reliability issues.
After purchase I did a full format (not the quick one) in about 10-15 minutes and copied 4GB of data (450 files) in about two hours. My data is just volatile enough that that I actually do save time compared to a DVD-RW by not having to rewrite the bulk of the data as a whole disc over and over again. Even though I pay double for the media I expect it to hold up much better with this kind of usage pattern.
As to cost, it was about $7 for a 20gb 5-pack. This cost per gb is equivalent to the used price of a hard drive on the installment plan.
The plus side of such a comparison is that when a drive crashes, all the data is gone vs having a set of discs that you can still read. The minus is that the current DVD-RAM optical media write speed is about thirty times slower than a hard drive in the above example.
The read speed was about ten times faster than the write speed in my test. The drive I used for the test was a Lite-On 20X DVD writer called the Super Allwrite whose box says that it has a DVD-RAM rewrite speed of 12X. No special software was used. No driver needed to be installed on the Windows XP system. All the transfers were drag and drop.
One thing that you do not have is the warm cozy feeling of a second verification pass saying that everything was perfect.
The five Panasonic discs come in half-thickness jewel cases. They are gold when viewed from the top side and brown with striations when viewed from the other side. The burned area is darker than the unburned area.