Do you want to make a back-up, or “burn” a copy of your important documents? Have you ever wanted to put your digital photos on a disk to share with your friends and family? Are you worried about security and want to back up your hard drive? Would you like to get rid of all those floppy disks you have lying around?
You can now copy hundreds of megabytes of data onto a single Compact Disc (CD) or Digital Video Disc (DVD), and it is a lot easier than you think. New CD and DVD writing drives and software are getting more affordable.
Advantages of CD-RW (Rewritable)
CD-RW drives retain two distinct advantages over even the highest-end DVD multiformat drives. First and most importantly, they cost significantly less. The second advantage is speed—CD-RW drives can record on CD-R media at 52X and rewrite on CD-RW at 32X, while state-of-the-art DVD drives max out at 40X and 24X, respectively. This means that CD-Rs can be up to twice as fast as DVDRs.
Advantages of DVDs
Being able to record DVDs on a personal computer has some distinct advantages. DVD media can hold more than seven times the information of a standard compact disc.
DVDs look identical to the CD, and are single- or double-sided. Each side may contain a second layer that further extends the storage capacity of the disc. Current DVD standards have settled on a format allowing up to 4.7 gigabytes of data storage per side (single layer).
Recordable DVDs match this storage size, but differ in terms of how they go about achieving it. The two forms of recordable DVD media currently available are called DVD+RW (DVD "plus" RW) and DVD-RW (DVD "dash" RW). Multi-format DVD burners are your best defense against confusing recordable media standards.
Burning Speeds
CD-burners feature three numbers, each of which is followed by an "X." These numbers represent the write, rewrite, and read speeds (in that order). So, a 24X10X40X burner writes data at a speed of 24X, rewrites data at a speed of 10X, and reads data at a speed of 40X.