To CD-R or CD-RW? - by Lou Lyons
CD-R's are "write once" media. Once you've burned something to a CD-R, that's it.
You can not edit, or change in any way the file you burned to the CD-R. The only thing you can do is
delete a file, but even that is a misnomer because all that does is make the file disappear (forever)
from the Table of Contents. The file is still there, and it does consume space, but you cannot access
it. If you deleted every single file on a full disk it would appear to be a blank disk, but you would
not be able to burn another file to that disk.
A CD-RW is much like a big floppy disk. You can write, erase, alter, etc. They are also not as
reliable as a CD-R disk. For the majority of tasks, especially archiving, the CD-R is the appropriate
media, which is nice since they are also a lot cheaper than CD-RW's. For backing up, and storing files
that you are going to edit "later", or might want to really delete, a CD-RW is the appropriate
media to use.
Just to give you some perspective, I have hundreds of CD-R disks, but have used only 2 CD-RW's in
the 3 years I've been burning disks. Basically, a CD-RW can be used only on your computer's CD burner
or on a top player that can handle CD-RWs, whereas a CD-R when "closed" can be read on any CD ROM
drive. Even a CD-R, if left open so that you can add new files until it is full, can only be read
in your CD burner. You cannot "close" a CD-RW. Therefore you can use it only on a computer equipped
with a burner.
CD-RWs are really not appropriate for music recording or copying, since it's unlikely
you're going to do anything to a music file, but, yes, they can be used for that purpose
-- it just doesn't make much sense most of the time.
For a lot of details, go to http://www.cdrfaq.org/.
You'll be able to zero in on your specific questions at the above link, which is updated every month.
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