CD-RW questions

Factual Questions
1

I am considering getting a CD-RW drive for my computer.

  1. What are the differences between an internal and an external CD-RW drive?

  2. Can a CD-RW drive record CD-Rs?

  3. How much data can a CD-RW hold?

  4. What are the advantages of CD-R over CD-RW?

  5. Are music CDs recorded in a computer drive sound as good as one recorded on a Hi-Fi?

  6. Do CD0-RW discs play on all CD players?

2

  1. External is great if you don’t want to exchange a current drive in your computer for a new one. They are also easier to install.

  2. Usually, but check the box, it will say what it’s compatible with.

  3. 650-700 Megs

  4. CD-R can be played in more CD players and CD-ROMs than CD-RWs. They are also cheaper. However, you can only record to them once.

  5. Depends on the quality of the original source, but yes, they should.

  6. No.

3
  1. Where they go mainly. The only real reasons I can think of for getting an external in this day and age though are: your comp has no availaible expansion drives or your comp’s power supply can’t handle another peripheral.
  2. If you are buying a new one, almost certainly yes. In fact, I can’t really remember a burner out there that did CD-RW without also being able to do CD-R. The differences are in the media, not really in the drive itself.
  3. In general the same amount a CD-R will. Which is to say 650 MB to 700 MB or 74-80 minutes.
  4. Longer life. Seriously. Although this will vary depending on the quality of the media. CD-RWs have an expected life on the order of 10-50 years. CD-Rs on the order of a hundred. For the quiblers out there, please note I said on the order, not on the close order. Personal opinion: CD-Rs are darned cheap these days. I think its easier to just burn a new CD than deal with a re-recordable, but that is just me.
  5. Not sure I understand this one. Music CD’s from a comp generally sound as good as the source they are recorded from. Which is to say if you are burning from .wav files your will get ‘higher’ quality than from .wav files that were converted from .mp3s. Many people think MP3s sound slightly ‘tinny’ when compared to say a vinyl original, but again this may depend on the compression. Again some personal opinion: assuming the mp3 was decent in the first place, not much different with say a store bought CD. YMMV - sound engineers tend to have a different take on this than those who are not trained to ‘hear’ the differences.
  6. No, but a caveat. The issues tend to be with older drives. Also I would make the point that if you are going after music CD’s, as implied by 5, you are more likely to run into problems trying to play CD-RWs on a Stereo than if you use a CD-R.

In general, unless you are buying a used drive, you are getting both CD-R & CD-RW capacity by default. My recommendation is use CD-RW for data cd’s that are likely to have info changed on a regular basis, use CD-R for long term data archive & music.

Oh, and you didn’t ask but I recommend Plextor.

Hope this helps.

4

Another question - How fast is data access from a CD-R compared to a floppy disk or a hard disk.

5
      • www.cdrfaq.org tells just about everything there is to know about the CD-R standard and its variants, but some of your questions concerning “which drive is better” are Consumer-Reports-type stuff, and fairly subjective.
  • When a CD is spinning, the search times are pretty quick ( much less than 1 second) but still slower than a HD. CD’s don’t normally spin all the time though.
    ~
6

External drives can be slower than internal. If your computer has a USB 1.1 port, this will limit the speed of a CD-R/RW drive to 6x speed. To get around this bottleneck you need to install a USB2 or IEEE 1394 (FireWire) interface in your computer. These are much faster and allow you to use the full speed of any CD-R drive.

7

Certainly many times faster than a floppy disk, but not as fast as a modern hard drive.

The floppy disk will probably go the way of the dodo fairly soon. It’s very slow (compared to CDs of any stripe), low-capacity (there were some prototypes that held more than 1.4Mb, but they don’t seem to have caught on), and unreliable (floppies don’t survive a lot of reading and writing, and when a floppy goes bad, it’s usually irreparable). At the same time, CD burners are getting to be dirt cheap.

I’m waiting for them to bring back the old-style floppies. We used to have some Wang computers that used 8-inch diamater floppies that had stiff paper cases (instead of plastic). That’s why they’re stilled called “floppy” disks, by the way - the old ones really were floppy!