What is a CD Burner?
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!
A CD burner, more formally a CD-R drive, is a device used to write data to a recordable compact disc. Though initially sold for hundreds of dollars when they were introduced in the mid-90s, used models can now be found on eBay for around US$10. CD burners arguably helped kickstart the era of music and gaming piracy, as one of the first applications was cheaply copying music and game CDs. CDs hold slightly under 700MB (megabytes) of data, which works out to about 11 hours of compressed music or a few hours of medium-quality video. The burning process takes anywhere between a few minutes and half an hour, depending on the speed of your CD burner. Devices that encode data to higher-capacity DVD discs are called DVD burners. The term CD burner derives from the use of a laser to write data to the optical disc. Lasers are thought to be hot — though the laser used to write CDs is not — hence the term “burning”.
Properly known as a CD Writer, it looks just like a regular CD player, optionally labeled as a CD-R/CD-RW drive. The Writer may also be labeled with two or three numbers that represent the speeds at which the unit will Read, Write, and even Re-write a CD. The numbers are based on a standard which says music CDs play at 1X speed. So if you see a CD player with something like 24x/8x/4x you can tell that it’s playing back at 24 times the standard speed, it can Write a CD at 8 times the standard speed, and it can erase/re-write the CD at 4 times the standard speed. Of course none of this means that your music CDs will sound like Mickey Mouse, or that your data will now run faster. What it does mean is that the CD hardware is getting faster, it can feed information into your computer’s memory faster, which means fewer errors in your data when being written to the CD or read from the CD, and fewer skips when playing back a music CD. In response to the demand for the ability to make CDs witho
