CD Burners
A CD burner is an ideal drive to have for backing up your data or burning audio CDs. And since virtually all computers have a CD-ROM drive, you can conveniently distribute and share your data if needed.
The Need for SpeedCD burners today are extremely fast. The top main stream write speed is 52x (7.8MB / sec) although some drives support 54x through CAV technology. Rewrite speed maxes out at 32x (4.8MB / sec). Although these speeds aren't maintained throughout the entire burning process, it still takes only 2-3 minutes to burn an entire CD.
CD Burner TerminologyThere's a lot of technical terms related to CD burners. Here's a few of them you may encounter:
- Buffer Underrun
Because a CD burner has to write data nonstop to the recordable media, data must always be available in its memory buffer. If the buffer ever gets empty, a buffer underrun occurs and the CD becomes a coaster. However, advances in CD buffer underrun protection and the ever increasing speed of computers and hard drives have made buffer underruns rare.
- Digital Audio Extraction (DAE)
This is the process of extracting or ripping audio tracks from music CDs. Most CD burners allow you to do this.
- Disk At Once (DAO)
Disk At Once is a method of burning to a CD without shutting off the write laser. This lets you burn audio CDs without a 2-second gap between tracks.
- Mount Rainier
This is a format for CD-RW discs that has features similar to a floppy disk. Copying files to a CD-RW is as simple as a drag and drop operation. When a bad sector on the disc is encountered, the built-in defect management will mark the sector as hidden and use spare ones. Mount Rainier also uses 2K logical addressing, allowing the file system and caching capabilities to be transparent to the user.
- Session At Once (SAO)
Session At Once is a way to burn data in sessions with the ability to add more to the CD at a later time.
- Track At Once (TAO)
Track At Once is method of burning where the write laser is turned off between tracks, creating a 2-second gap. This method can be used for audio but not data.
CD Burner SaleStart shopping for a CD burner by browsing these subcategories: