Can I keep writing/erasing ad infinitum or is there something physical that will wear out from continued rewrites? Thanks.
Yes, although in my experience they are likely to perish from wear to the external surfaces before the recording medium packs up.
Essentially the recording medium in a CDR is a material that, when heated and cooled in one way, reflects light more than when heated and cooled another way; repeated cycles of heating and cooling will eventually break down the material chemically or otherwise.
Are we talking hundreds or thousands of rewrites?
There are real limits to the number of times that a CDRW can be re-writen but they are so far beyond the number of R/W/RW cycles any user would typically do during a lifetime of use it’s really sort of a waste of time to worry about hitting this limit for most people. If you had the CDRW disk in a system 24/7 and you are using a utility that makes it mimic a hard disk there might be reason to be concerned.
Between 1,000 to 10,000 re-writes are the limits I have typically heard used for CDRWs depending on the media (IIRC some formulations are rated to have more RW cycles than others)
Great. Thanks all.
If used in packet write mode though, the data is continually erased and overwritten as (in some respects, at least) the disc is used like an ordinary rewritable hard drive; the CDs may wear out quicker that way.
I bet the ones made by the real manf like Sony last longer than cheapo ones.
I’m informed that the reason that the coatings on CDR/RWs are all different colours depending on who you buy them from is that each manufacturing company, having devloped a phase-change dye/wax (or whatever it is actually called), patents the formula; another company wanting to make similar media without entering into a licence agreement, must develop their own solution.
If this truly is the case, I’d imagine that the performance of certain types is better than others.
My computer always “coasters” TDK CDs for some reason.