Most of us have burn a CD or some kind of optical device at one time or another. When CD burners came out mainstream in the late 90’s everyone was on it.
People where making their own CD’s (Compact Disks) rather than buying them from the music store and seemed like it couldn’t get any better. It wasn’t long after DVD’s (Digital Versatile Disks) entered the arena and suddenly not only could we make our own movie disks, but we could store large amounts of data easily and conveniently.
Blu-Ray disks have further pushed how much data we can fit onto a disk and the quality of our high definition movies, but a lot of people still don’t understand the differences in optical disks and terminology associated with it.
What is an Optical Disk/Drive
An optical disk is basically the CD, DVD or Blu-ray disk a computer uses to store data. Data is not just Microsoft Word documents and photos. When you are listening to a song or watching a movie, it is a bunch of arranged data in a way your optical drive can understand, read and display it to the screen so you can watch and listen.
Optical drives don’t just read data; they can also write which is called burning.
Burning is the process of putting the data onto a optical disk so it can be read and played back at a later time. If you want to burn a Blu-ray disk you will need a Blu-ray burner and so on for DVD’s and CD’s. A lot of burners will now do all three.
What is -R +R and RW
If you have ever bought a pack of CD’s or DVD’s you might have seen these letter printed on the side of packaging.
Often ignored because optical drives have a lot of functions, there are actually quite important for the use of the disks and making sure they fit for the right job when burning.
The letter “R” in this terminology stands for “Recordable“.
-R means once you have finished burning to this type of disk and you have finished your burn and locked your session you can not burn onto the disk again. Forever more the disk will only be readable.
+R means you do not have to fill the disk up all at once. Once you have finished burning to it, you can always go back to it until it is full and add more data to the disk through a burn.
RW means re-writable. Not only can you burn multiple sessions to the disk, you can also go back to it later on and delete data, making it much more like a USB thumb drive. However, there is a limit to how many times you can write and delete data off these drives.
What can I use to burn a disk
There are plenty of options to use for burning disks. Some are very basic and others are industry grade recording packages. I like to keep things as simple as possible and i use a program which is free called CDBurnerXP.
Most operating systems will come with built in burning applications but more of them are quite vague. If you are looking for some good free burning applications please check out Lifehacker.
Storage Limitations
Not all optical disks where created equal. Depending on the type you buy will dictate how much data you can store on them.
CD – 700MB to 900MB
DVD – 4.7GB to 17GB
Blue-Ray – 25GB to 128GB
There are plenty more types of disks on the market, but over the years they have seemed to fade away leaving the three i have discussed as the main media optical types you can purchase in any store.
