Getting A USB CD Writer

A USB CD Writer drive is often referred to as a CD burner. It acquired the name of a burner because a laser is used to write the data onto a compact disk. When one thinks of a laser, one usually imagines it to be hot, and thus the term "burning." In reality, the laser that is used to write the data onto the optical disk is not a hot laser, but the term has obviously stuck. In the 1990s, CD writers marked the beginning of music, video, and gaming piracy since it gave everyone the ability to cheaply copy CDs.

A CD can hold about 700 Megabytes of data. 700 MB is equal to around eleven hours of music or a couple hours of video. Depending upon the speed of your burner and the amount of data being burned, this process can take only a few minutes or up to a half an hour.

There are two different kinds of CDs onto which you can burn data. A CD-R is a CD that can only be used for one burn. Then there are CD-RWs that can be rewritten up to a thousand times. Two different processes are used to burn data with each of these burnable CDs. With CD-Rs, a dye is used. The laser changes the chemical nature of the dye, thus changing its reflectivity. Once this is done on a CD-R, it is permanent and it can never be changed. CD-RWs use a crystalline metal alloy. This alloy can be changed many times, transforming it from being reflective to amorphous, allowing the CD to be burned with different data over and over again.

A CD writer's speed is rated in multiples of one hundred and fifty kilobytes per second written, or KB/s for short. Using this rating method, a 300 KB/s burner would be rated as a 2X. The fastest a CD writer can spin is around ten thousand times per minute, making the rating a 52X. It is not possible to make a CD spin any faster than 52X, since the plastic at the center of the disk would actually move outwards.

If you purchase an external CD burner it will often interface with your computer through a universal serial bus port, or USB for short. USB ports are one of the most common connection ports on modern computers, as well as peripheral devices. You can recognize it by its rectangular and very distinctive male and female ends.

The current USB version is 2.0, and previous versions are incompatible with it. If you have a rather new laptop or desktop, then you will almost certainly have USB ports available. But if you decide to purchase a used USB CD Writer off of eBay for example, keep in mind that the ports may not always be compatible.