A CD burner writes data to a recordable compact disc, with used models now available cheaply. CDs hold 700MB of data and burning takes minutes to half an hour. CD-Rs are permanent, while CD-RWs can be rewritten up to 1,000 times. Burner speed is rated in multiples of 150 KiB/s, with the fastest running at 52X.
A CD burner, more formally a CD-R drive, is a device used to write data to a recordable compact disc. Though initially selling for hundreds of dollars when they were introduced in the mid-1990s, used models can now be found quite cheaply. These devices probably helped usher in the era of music and game piracy as one of the earliest applications was cheap copying of music and game CDs.
CDs hold just under 700MB of data, which equates to about 11 hours of compressed music or a few hours of average quality video. The burning process takes anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, depending on the speed of your CD burner. Devices that encode data on larger capacity DVD discs are called DVD burners. The name comes from the use of a laser to write data to the optical disc. Lasers are thought to be hot, although the laser used to write CDs is not, hence the term “burning”.
There are two types of writable CDs: CDs that can be written once (CD-R) and CDs that can be written over and over again (CD-RW). Rewritable discs are rated for up to 1,000 rewrites. On a CD-R disc, an organic dye is used to encode data, and a laser applied to precise points changes the chemical properties of the dye, changing its reflectivity, which allows a passive laser to read data from the disc in the future. With a CD-R, the CD burning process is permanent and cannot be undone. A crystalline metal alloy is used on a CD-RW that can repeatedly transform from a reflective to an amorphous state, depending on the amount of laser power applied.
The speed of a CD burner is rated in multiples of 150 KiB/s (kilobytes written per second). A 300 KiB/s writer is rated at 2X, a 600 KiB/s writer at 4X, and so on. The fastest possible burners run at 52X, which causes the disc to spin about 10,000 times per minute. If the puck moved faster, the plastic in the center of the puck would start creeping towards the edges.
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