A compact disc that is rewriteable is commonly referred to as a CD-RW. CD-RW is a compact disc (CD) format that allows repeated recording on a disc. Prior to the rlease of the CD-RW, CDs had been read-only audio, to be played in CD players, and multimedia (CD-ROM), to be played in computers' CD-ROM drives. Now, any user with a CD recorder drive can create their own CDs from their desktop computers. CD-RW drives can write both CD-R and CD-RW discs and can read any type of CD.
- CD-R is a write once, read many format. This means, you can write to the disk only once and the data can not be changed afterwards. A CD-RW, however, can be written to many times.
- CD-RW discs usually hold 74 minutes (650MB) of data, although some can hold up to 80 minutes (700MB) and, according to some reports can be rewritten as many as 1000 times. It is possible to save data to a CD-RW in the same way as one can save it to a floppy disk.
- You can use a CD-RW on any computer to read data from, but can only write data to a CD-RW with a computer that has a CD Recorder drive.
- On campus in the ITS Computer Labs 206 Murchie Science Building, 205 French Hall, and 3174 William S. White Building computers are equipped with CD-RW drives.
Thomas Stockwell
I am a computer science major at the University of Michigan-Flint, and I am currently working as both a HelpDesk Consultant and Computer Lab Consultant in the ITS department. Along with my programming endeavors at the University of Michigan, I am also a writer for the CodeProject website. A link to my profile and programming articles can be found here.
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