I had almost forgotten that these things existed. But even back in the day I loathed these things. They were significantly slower than burning a normal CD (I think it was 4x while very few drives would support 16x max.) and they were highly unreliable.
Anybody remembers Roxio DirectCD? It was a program for Windows 98 that allowed adding or deleting files from a CD-RW using windows explorer. Buggy as hell.
I personally prefered burning a normal CD rather than going through the process of deleting a CD-RW, then burning it at 4x and praying that the data would be readable. Besides, blank CDs were dirt cheap even back in the Windows 98 days.
Anyway, is anybody still using these things? Are they still being produced? With modern USB drives that can hold hundreds of times more data and are a lot faster an more reliable I doubt anyone would use CD-RWs.
It’s quite useful for taking something from your computer and playing it in a CD/DVD player. It’s useful for programs that need a live CD (as getting them to boot off USB is difficult.) Sure, you could use a new Cd-R each time, but it’s very, very wasteful, and I hate waste. And, at least with a CD-RW, I don’t have to worry about running out at an inopportune time.
Flash drives pretty much take care of any data read/writing that I want to do
When I burn a CD, it’s usually either for a music CD or long term data storage. Either way it’s not something I’m going to want to alter data on. So CD-R is fine.
CDs & DVDs are dirt cheap, especially if you buy in bulk. And as mentioned in the OP, one-write discs burn so much faster. The rewriteable discs SUCK both in cost, time needed to burn, and reliability/compatibility.
So no, I don’t use them and I NEVER used them once I realized all of these things.
CDR were not always cheep and I did use CD-RW. I especially used them in the beginning when it was easy to get a CD coaster during a burn.
I wouldn’t by a CD-RW now. I don’t use the CD-RW blanks I currently still have. I use one of hundreds of blank CDR I purchased years when they all went so cheap. With some rebates they were actually free. I use a DVD+R for stuff that needs that large a storage solution. Mostly I use an external hard drive. The only reason I really used cds in the first place was to back up data when hard drives were significantly smaller and more expensive than burning to a CD. Who would want a terabyte hard drive backed up to cds?