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Would you recommend CD-RW?


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With the UDF thingy? I personally haven't start using CD-RW because the one that came with my Samsung Drive is pooped! Maybe it's becos I End Task while it's formatting for the first time.

I've a question, could I burn CD-RW like CD-R instead of UDF and format and ReBurn it like a CD-R again?

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Personally I find CD-RW's to be a waste of time when CDR's are so cheap.

Why take the time to burn a CD-RW at 24x when my burner can burn a normal CDR at 52.

I'd just use a CDR and reburn when needed, all around it's faster and more cost effective for me. :)

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:) I have a company I buy them from locally in cases of 500 for around a half a cent per CD. ;) Good quality ones also, normally TDK so I just don't ask too many questions. ;)

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UDF is the latest CDRW standard. It formats the disk before use so it can be used as a big floppy drive. The downside of UDF formatting is that you lose about 100MB of disk space during formatting.

I wouldn't recommend UDF formatting unless you really require it.

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Now, just to format my CD-RW without any error! The one that came with my Samsung Drive, not everyday I get 16X CD-RW for free! I wanna try it!

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I find Nero inCD to work best for me, but I haven't tried roxio software since XP came out so maybe they've gotten better.

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My floppy drive died, and I don't know how I could survive without them. I've burned several times on one and when I want to I can erase the CD and start over. If you use CD-Rs for something that's 5 MB or something that is a complete waste. I recommend CD-RW for that.

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I've played around with InCD and always get errors. Seems like more trouble then it is a feature. Just burn a multi-session CD-RW.

This also makes the cd-rw more likely to be compatible with any random CD drive.

I really like the idea to use your CD-RW's more like floppies. That would be really neet, but it just seems like the software that does that is just too intrusive on your system.

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I've a question, could I burn CD-RW like CD-R instead of UDF and format and ReBurn it like a CD-R again?

Yes. You can write files to a CD-RW using Nero (or whatever) and then reformat the disc to use it again. You don't need to use UDF.

UDF wastes about 100MB of your CD-RW capacity. Burning mutiple sessions (without reformating in between) onto a CD-RW wastes about 15MB per session. If you choose to burn small files every couple of days (using multiple sessions without reformatting) then eventually you will get a very inefficient disc. (i.e. you burn a single 5MB file onto a CD-RW using Nero and it will take 20MB of the CD-RW's capacity).

Thus the real advantage in UDF is when many, many sessions are required. This is why people refer to this format as a floppy disk replacement. At least your capacity should never be less than 550MB. It's set.

UDF is too much of a pain for me to bother with. Why? The UDF software is intrusive (too much memory and/or system resources even when you're not actively using it). There is a greater risk of corrupting the media and losing data. There are compatibility problems in taking the data to another computer (there are UDF readers than can solve this). Formatting a UDF disc takes too long (you can buy preformatted discs to deal with this).

There is a proposed format replacement for UDF that is designed to fix some or all of these problems. It's called Mt. Rainer. Microsoft plans to include Mt. Rainer support for CD-RW and DVD+RW drives in the next version of Windows. (Last time I checked, they planned on supporting DVD+RW instead of DVD-RW for whatever reason).

I was going to recommend you find a CD-RW drive that is Mt. Rainer compatible but since CD-RW drives these days are cheap and disposable then you might as well just buy one once they standard is fully established.

I believe you can get 3rd party Mt. Rainer software and the hardware is definitely already available but it won't be popular until Microsoft includes it in an OS.

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