Buying A Computer: Drives (Part 3): Affordability And Performance Buying Tips
Hard Drive and Multimedia Drives: Today, we will delve into the optical drive family used in computer desktops today. This family consists of the compact disk (CD) and the digital versatile disk (DVD).
CDs for a computer are no different than audio CDs for your CD player. They can store between 650MB to 700MB of data. As of the writing of this article (1/13/2006), CDs and CD recorders are very standard and CDs will easily interchange between equipment and maintain compatibility.
I know at this point, for some of you on this mailing, this information is �old hat�; however, for the sake of the beginner, I want to cover this information in its basic detail.
We will now look at the two basic CD formats: CD-R and CD-RW.
CD-R stands for CD recordable. CD-R is what is called WORM (Write Once, Read Many) media. WORM simply says that if you write to a CD-R once, you can not write to it again; but, you can read it over and over again.
Here�s a little affordability tip: In reality, with the right software (Nero Ahead is such software), you can write to a CD-R multiple times; however, you cannot physically over-write the previously written data. When you write multiple times to a CD-R disk, you are appending new data to the end of the previously written data. Consequently, when you have written enough new data to equal between 650MB to 700MB you can no longer write any more data to the disk.
Ok, I promised you bite-size lessons so I will stop now. In Part 4, we will look at CD-RW technology. Talk to you then!
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By : Olan Butler
Keyword : CD-R, CDROM, CD drives
