CD-R and CD-RW drives
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In the era of mass flash storage, many people thought that the time of disks was over. But no, disks will always serve as a place for permanent storage of information. Let's take a look at the types of drives and their characteristics.
CD-R drive
CD-R drive is a disk drive with the ability to write information to a special disk once. Recording on CD-R disks is carried out due to the presence of a special photosensitive layer on them, which burns out under the influence of a high-temperature laser beam. This process resembles an ordinary photograph.
There are several types of media - "dummy" for CD-R drives, which differ in the color of the inner layer. Yellow disks are called "gold", and blue and green disks are called "silver" and "platinum", respectively.
You can not take these names seriously - it is clear, precious metals "dummies" are not covered. Specialists often argue about what type of "dummy" are suitable for a particular task - for example, "gold" disks are most often accused that the copies of AudioCD made on them are poorly read on some music centers.
It is important to select such cartridges, the recording of which coincides with the recording speed of the disk drive (10x, 12x, 14x, 20x, etc.).
CD-RW (ReWritable) drive
Today CD-R disk drives have actually left the market. They have been replaced by drives of a new standard, which allow you to record not only CD-R, but also reusable disks - CD-RW. These disks use a completely different technology from CD-R, and they are different as devices.
CD-RW disks also have areas that absorb and reflect light. But these are not bumps or pits as in CD-ROM and CD-R disk drives. CD-RW disk is a kind of layer cake, where on the metal base there is a working, active layer. It consists of a special material that changes its state under the influence of a laser beam.
Being in a crystalline state, some parts of the layer scatter light, and other parts - amorphous - pass it through themselves, on the reflective metal substrate. With this technology, information can be written to the disk, not just read.
At the same time, CD-RWs can easily cope not only with disks of their own format, but also with CD-ROM and CD-R disks. At the same time, CD-R-R disks can be written up to 52-fold, and CD-RW disks - up to 24-fold. Speed characteristics are indicated in the name of the disk drive - for example, 12x8x32, where the smaller value corresponds to the CD-RW writing speed, and the maximum - the reading speed.
Disk drive interface. Like any disk drives, CD-R and CD-RW are available in several versions - USB, SCSI and IDE. The SCSI interface is used by the fastest and most expensive devices, while medium-priced disk drives are available in IDE version.
Manufacturers of floppy disk drives. The most popular today are floppy disks with the brand name Panasonic, Sony, Ricoh, Teac or Yamaha. The most expensive and high-quality models are produced by Plextor and Hewlett-Packard, among inexpensive IDE-disk drives popular models Mitsumi.
