How Many Times Can You Reuse a CD-RW

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t use CDs often anymore and CD-R’s are cheap, but I now have a temp job, where it seems the best way to transfer would be using a CD.

Now if I burn a CD-R I would have a permenent, but unneeded copy of the data. A CD-RW I could reuse.

Now I can get CD-R’s on sale very cheap so it might not be worth it to use CD-RW.

I was wondering from user experience, how many times can you re-use a CD-RW reliably. The packages say “up to 1000 times,” but I’m very skeptical of that. But then again I have no experience using them

Any thoughts? What has your personal experience been with them?

2

I believe they’re good for a few hundred cycles, usually. You’re probably going to lose, scratch, or break it mechanically before the rewriteableness is used up.

But I’d suggest that you just use a USB drive instead. You can get a 4GB one (5+x bigger than a CD-RW) for less than $10. It’s small enough to fit on a keychain, doesn’t require a lengthy erase/reburn cycle, and it’ll work on any computer with a USB slot.

3

The ones I use are good for hundreds of cycles. I don’t thing you could keep the media pristine enough for a 1,000 cycles. Those scuffs and such take their toll. You can definitely reuse them enough to make up for the difference in price for a cdr verses cdrw.

4

Thanks, unfortunately the procedure requires a CD, so I can’t use a USB or anything else, which would make things so nice

:slight_smile:

5

If you only need to save it on a temporary basis why don’t you email the work stuff you want to save to your home computer and email it back to work again as needed?

6

Curiosity piqued - what “procedure” requires the use of a CD, and why would a little USB thumb drive not be allowed?

7

I’ll take a guess that it is somewhere that they have concerns about Conficker type worms, which use a USB vunerability to propagate.

8

The other possibility that occurred to me is that it’s a system that has sensitive or classified data on it. So, you can bring a “read only” medium to the office (assuming there’s no CD burner on the work PC), but not a writeable medium, like a thumb drive.

9

There is security filters on these files. You can’t copy them, you can’t transfer them over a network, etc. Oddly enough you can simply burn the files to CD and the security filter is gone. (Well you can copy them but the results are jibberish)

Probably a similar scheme to WMA files that are DRM’d.

10

DoD currently bans any USB storage device from any system. The main reason in the conficker virus. One of the branches (Army I think) got hit hard right when it came out. Also makes it harder to accidently release classified data to an unclassed system.

-Otanx