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Buying a CD Writer

Iain Laskey advises what to look for in a CD writer

Anyone looking for a CD Writer can easily get overwhelmed by the vast number and variety on sale. What should you be looking for and why?

Internal or External?

Many people are happy buying an internal CD Writer. They’re actually quite easy to fit as long as you follow the instructions. Anyone who has fitted one before could get the whole job done in 5 minutes. On the plus side, they’re much cheaper than their external cousins and tend to be faster too compared to external ones connecting via USB 1. On the other hand, external drives are excellent for people who aren’t keen poking around inside their PC. The downside with external drive is they often need an external power supply to clutter your wall sockets with.

A ‘retail pack’ with blank media to get you started

Internal ones come in two basic flavours, IDE and SCSI. At one time SCSI was the choice for those that wanted the ultimate CD burner but these days there is little difference in performance and the price premium simply isn’t worth it. If you want an internal, go IDE.

 External drives come in all shapes.

External ones usually connect via USB 1.1, USB 2 or Firewire. USB 1.1 limits the performance a bit but USB 2 and Firewire connected ones should perform well although you’ll need to make sure your PC has suitable connectors otherwise you’ll also have to budget for a suitable adapter card. It could be argued though, if you have to open the PC to fit the adapter card, why bother with the external drive to begin with?

One big advantage of external drives is that you can easily swap them between different PCs so if you have 2 or more, this could be a cost effective choice for backup.

Speed

Normally, the faster the better is the rule here. You can get CD burners that go up to 40x at the time of writing. That means they burn data at 40x the basic read speed of an audio CD. You could burn a whole 74 minute album in a couple of minutes. Nice!

Not all blank  media can cope with the higher speeds though and if you intend buying the cheap 20p CD-R blanks, you might not want to bother with the fastest recorder on the planet – a 16X or 24X would do fine. Media that can cope with the fastest drives normally carries a price premium and in the case of CD-RW blanks, can actually be quite hard to find.

CD-R or CD-RW?

These days nearly all drives support both CD-R (write once) blanks and CD-RW (write over and over). There are still a few drives out there, that only handle CD-R. Keep an eye out for those and avoid if reusing  CDs is important to you.

If you want to create compilation music CDs to play in the car or on your home HiFi, stick to CD-R media as there are very few car or HiFi players that can cope with CD-RW disks. Some can though so it is always worth experimenting a bit here to see what your own kit can handle.

There are two sizes of blank CD-Rs, 74 minute ones which hold 650Mb and 80 minute ones that hold 700Mb. Some devices have trouble playing back the 80minute ones so they’re best used for data rather than audio CDs

Software

Most CD Writers come complete with suitable software for creating audio and music CDs. The two most common are Roxio’s CD Creator and Nero from Ahead Software. Both are good products but if your machine runs Windows XP, I’d lean away from CD Creator. It had terrible problems when XP was first released and even now after updates and patches, people still have problems on occasion. On any other version of Windows it’s fine though – I use it on two of my PCs. Nero has a staunch fan base and for XP users is a far better bet so look for a burner that bundles Nero if this is an issue for you. (Ed's note - Check out Roxio's WinOnCD as well - XP loves it!)

Media

You can buy blank CD-Rs for under 20p mail order or you can pay ten times that in a high street shop. Whilst you can have some problems with the cheaper media, if you’re only creating compilation music CDs, they’ll be fine. For longer term archival or backups, it’s probably worth spending a bit extra on branded media such as TDK or Verbatim.

Be careful of the expensive ‘Audio CD’ blanks. These will work but are designed for CD recorders that are part of a HiFi, not a PC.

Why?

This should perhaps be the first question you ask but it’s worth mentioning just what you can do with a CD writer. You can backup your PC (with suitable software) to one or more CDs, you can backup important CDs both audio and data, copyright permitting, you can create data CDs to hold safe copies of your files such as digital photos or you could make Video CDs (VCDs) of your camcorder footage that you can then watch on most DVD players. You’ll need extra hardware and software for that trick though.