What is a CD Burner?

By The Manolith Team on September 25th, 2008

A CD burner is also known as a CD-R drive, and is a device that’s used for writing data onto a recordable/removable compact disc. CD burners were originally sold for hundreds of dollars after their introduction in the mid 1990s. The passage of time has made the units much more affordable, so much so that they can now be purchased online for as little as ten bucks!

These units decidedly helped to jump start the massive piracy era. People use their CD burners to illegally download and copy games and movies. The average CD holds just under 700 megabytes worht of data, which translates to nearly eleven hours of compact music and several hours worth of mid-grade video. The process of burning a CD can take anywhere from a few moments to thirty minutes, this of course is dependent upon the speed of your burner and your PCs capacity.

There are devices that will encode data to high-capacity DVDs. These units are called DVD burners. DVD burners differ from CD burners in that the term CD burner refers to the use of lasers to write data onto optical discs. Lasers are considered to be hot (thus the term ‘burning’), however the laser that is used to write a CD is not hot in the least.

There are two varying types of writable CD: CDs that we can write to only once (also called CD-R) and CDs we can write to multiple times (CD-RW). Rewritable CDs can be rewritten up to a thousand times. CD-R discs are coated in an organic dye that is used to record data. A later applies detailed points which changes the chemical composition of the dye, which in turn modifies the reflective surface of the CD. This allows a passive laser to read information from the disc at a later date. The process of burning a CD is irreversible. On the surface of a CD-RW, a crystalline metal alloy is utilized. This alolow can repeatedly transform back and forth between a reflective and unstructured state dependent upon the amount applied laser power.
The speed of a CD burner is rated in multiples of 150 kilobytes per second written. The most rapid CD burners operate at 52X, which will cause the disc to rotate around ten thousand times per minute. If the disc were to move faster than this, the plastic located at the center most point of the disc would begin creeping out toward the edges, which would throw a wrench in the whole works.