Advice and Deals on CD / DVD / Blu-ray Burner Drives

A CD burner, also known as a CD-R or CD-RW drive, has many uses. You can use it to backup your programs, create custom music CDs, make a photo album, or store video clips. If nothing else, you can just use it as a regular CD-ROM drive to play music CDs or install programs.

CD burner technology has really advanced since the first generation drives. You use to have to keep running programs to a minimum when burning a CD or risk causing a buffer underrun and ruining the CD. Now buffer underruns are a thing of the past. Today's CD burners are equipped with various buffer underrun protection schemes. With this new technology, you can do so much more while burning a CD and not worry about a buffer underrun. Of course with the incredibly fast burning speeds, the burn would finish before you could do much multi-tasking.

A DVD burner is a big step up from a CD Burner. With a DVD burner, you can record a whopping 4.7GB worth of data. That is about 7 times the capacity of a 74 minute CD!

DVD burners have advanced, but there is still some uncertainty with the DVD disc format. There are two recording formats that are competing with one another: DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW. Some drives support only one format while others support both. My advice is to go with a drive that supports both. This will cost you more than a drive that supports only one format, but having support for both formats will extend the life of your drive just in case one format overpowers the other. It will also allow you to exchange data in either format.

So what exactly is the difference between DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW formats? Well, the DVD-R/RW was the first standard to come out so it tends to be supported by more DVD players. However, DVD-RW in particular does not support lossless linking which means you have to reformat the whole disc if you want to make a change or add content. DVD+RW, on the other hand, does support lossless linking so you can add content without starting over. However, I have read that the capacity DVD+R discs is 8MB smaller which would prevent copying a completely filled DVD-R. There are some other minor differences, but, like I said, if you go with a drive that supports both formats, you can choose the best disc type for the job.

Blu-ray is the next step up from DVD. A blu-ray disc is the same physical size as a CD or DVD but it has a much greater storage density. A single layer Blu-ray holds 25GB while a double layer holds 50GB.

Blu-ray drives are available today that can both read and write to blu-ray media. This means you can play high definition movies and save data to a blu-ray disc from your computer.

Blu-ray drives are backwards compatible with CD and DVD. If you want to be able to read from every type of disc then this is the way to go.

Want to see what CD/DVD/Blu-ray burners are popular? View the top 10 CD/DVD/Blu-ray burner drives.