I finally have a CD burner, and I have a question. I know when you burn audio CD's its best not to max out the speed as its possible you may lose quality. But when burning software and videos onto CDR's, should I also not use my CD burner's maximum speed? I assume its ok to max it out with these, but you never know. Thanks in advance!

One more question. A friend told me when copying CDRs its best to load the CD onto the hard drive and THEN copy it onto another CD. He says that copying from one drive directly to another leads to possible problems. Is he right?

I am always use the slower speed for everything I want to reuse. I have used max. a few times without burning a coaster. I have played with the differant speeds of burning without any problems. I have 4 CD Burning programs I use and use differant ones for differant things. Waste a dime or two and play. Nero5.5 seems to work good for everything.

Jericho Your comment about copying to the hard drive, and burning from there is the fastest way if your CD drive and the CD-RW are on the same IDE channel, i.e. as master and slave. The IDE controller can't handle two way data fast enough! If the two drives are on the same channel, the burning software warns that a disc at once copy is risky. When I have several CDs to copy I change the DVD drive to be slave on the other channel with the hard drive. Yes, I know that slows the whole machine down, but I only do that for CD copying and return the drive afterwards. It's easier to change the cable than copy twice, but then I'm lazy :D

David

I know David I get the same message, but like you I am lazy and burn any how. I have not made a coaster yet. I do not like burning from my hard drive. I burn a lot of CDS. Maybe one day I might run into a problem doing this, but until then I will burn baby burn.

Burning at too slow a speed can damage a cdr. I've seen discs that have been burned holes in, others times the media will just melt inside and form a bubble, of course that section is unreadable. I burn at 24x from the hard drive, the max speed of my burner, and have never had a problem reading anything I burned. When copying disc to disc I do slow the speed down to 12x and depending what I copying from will sometimes run to the hard disc array first.

Burn speeds from the hardrive depend alot on how fast that data can be read..ive found where i use a older super 7 with a K6-2 450 and 7200 RPM Seagate, it still could not keep up with a 24x setting and would leave the cdr looking like a old LP album..and no this wasnt a track at once setting..lowering it to 8 or 16x worked fine.so it really depends on the system. As far as having both cdrom and cdrw .i used to not see any reason to have both..untill i had some problems with my cdrw booting a XP cd..so a cdrom comes in handy sometimes ..but of you have no problems no reason making a extra load on the PSU by leaving it in there.

I burn all my discs at top speed (40x) and have never had a problem reading. When copying a disc I use disc at once, no worries. My cdr is master and my dvd rom is slave on the same IDE channel. I burn a 75 min. audio Cd in less than 4 minutes. NEVER a problem and no reduction in quality. Burn proof and various other technologies guard against buffer under run errors. Audio CD's usually record at only 24x no matter how high you set the speed.
With modern motherboards, the worry of burning from the same IDE channel is pretty much gone. Unhooking your cd rom and re hooking it up to another channel just to burn is a waste of time and energy.
The IMPORTANT thing is to use good media when burning.I don't see a real need to burn at slower speeds. Why have a 32x or 40x CDR if you feel the quality will be reduced if you record at these speeds?
Buy quality media and burn as fast as you want.

"I am always use the slower speed for everything I want to reuse."
What do you burn that you don't want to "reuse'?????

Yeah i pretty much knew it was my older system slowing me down to have to lower the speed, i mentioned that so if anyone had problems at higher speeds burning off the hardrive then selecting a lower speed will help..some media needs to be burned at a lower speed anyways..ive never seen any reason to have beyond a 24x burner. And this does have buffer underun protection yet it still would skip a beat..it wouldnt say it was but the cdr sure showed it was..it could have been the media also. But lowering the speed somehwhat got the job done and it really wasnt that much slower.

Look at burning as you do playing a game. Shut down all of your background programs. Lessen the load a bit. Use good software, like Nero. Use good media, preferably Japanese manufactured, like Tayo Yuden or Mitsui or my favourite, Mitsubishi Chemical. Brand name doesn't mean anything, it's who the actual manufacturer is.
Of course, all systems will respond differently, but my point is, there are more factors involved than just the speed you burn at.
A good CD/R/RW helps too. Mine is a Plextor and I've read that with a Plextor and Nero you can burn at 40x and defragment your hard drive at the same time without producing a coaster. An experiment I will leave for a time when I have nothing better to do. Happy burning anyway!;)

I have burned disks with Nero and my16x Lite-On without shutting anything done, while online, while defragging, etc...I have yet to burn a coaster that wasn't caused by either a physical prblem with the blank disk (one was badly scratched) or an actual problem with some of the files (they were corrupted, so it was only really half a coaster?). They key is DMA and Smart-Burn....

Almost all drives have some sort of buffer protection along the lines of Smart-Burn and they all are DMA capable these days. Many problems are media related not speed related, like was mentioned before, high quality media, certified to run at a certain speed will do at least that speed (I have seen some people getting good results burning 40x TY at 48x). If you need to slow down to get a good burn try a different brand of media...and in Nero one of the tools will tell you the actual maker of the blank.

I've been told time ago that it's better to burn at a lower speed to ensure compatibility with older cdrom's...
Is that true?