CD-RW Drives (rewritable) | Tech Info Home Page |

General Information

Re-writable CD-ROM drives are capable erasing and writing the disk as many as 1000 times. They can record on CD-RW (rewritable) disks or on CD-R recordable disks.

If you are looking for current Rewritable drives, or any type of new or old software drivers for rewritable drives, please follow the link to "The Rewritable Drives" page.

The surface is a 6-layer coating of a phase-change alloy. It consists of Silver, Indium, antimony, and tellurium. The laser beam changes the reflective properties of the coating allowing the beam to be seen with more or less intensity.

There are two methods of recording, by using a special program that records the whole CD at once or by using special programs that allow you to use the Explorer Windows 95 program to drag and drop files and folders into the CD-ROM within Explorer. The drag and drop method requires you to pre-format the CD disk with a large drawback which is that the final formatted capacity looses about 150 megabytes giving you only about 490 MB of useful recordable space.

Drives can be either internal or external.

Internal drives connect to the motherboard using an IDE cable which is the same cable used by hard drives and CD-ROM drives. Up to 2 devices can be connected to the IDE cable and most new computer motherboards are capable of having two IDE connectors allowing for up to 4 devices (2 per IDE connector).

External drives can be connected to either the parallel port, the USB port or to the new Firewire connector. 

Firewire is a new technology which is not available on most computers. To use a Firewire drive, you will most likely have to buy and install a Firewire Card.

The parallel port connector type drives will work with all PC computers provided you have the appropriate drives. 

The USB style drives will work with Windows 98 and Windows 2000/ME provided you have the appropriate drivers and the latest version of the burner software (CD recording software).

The fastest drives are the internal drives, although the Firewire models should in theory be faster. The slowest are the parallel port drives.

All drives should be capable of reading CD-ROM disks without any drivers or burner software but need the burner software to perform the recording. 

CD-RW drives are capable of recording to both CD-R (recordable) and CD-RW (re-writable) blank disks. The process of recording is faster then the re-writing. The typical designation for a drive specification is something like 4x12x32x. The smaller number is the speed of the re-writable function, the next number is the speed of the recordable function and the largest number is the speed of reading standard CD-ROM drives.

More information on CD-R/CD-RW media.

CD Formats supported

• CD-Digital Audio
• CD-ROM (XA)
• CD-Bridge Multisession
• CD-I, Video-CD
• UDF

Etch Methods

• TAO (Track At Once)
• DAO (Disc At Once)
• MS (Multi Session)
• Incremental Packet Writing - see the Packet Writing page, 

Drive compatibility types

• CD-ROM
• CD-Audio
• CD-Video
• Photo-CD
• CD-R
• CD-RW

Write compatibility

• CD-R  - Orange Book Parties 2&3

Capacity

• 650 Mo (74 minutes)

Speed

• read : 6x (900 KB/s)
• record : 2x (300 KB/s)

Types of Loading

• Power Assisted Tray Loading
• Manual Loading

Interface Types

• EIDE
• SCSI
• Parallel Port  (External Models)

Links

• ...Lots of CD recordable Info @ fadden.com Link,

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