Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on September 14, 2004, 01:57:55 am
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Will overburn really mess up your CD recorder?
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your cd maybe. iirc overburning achieves more space by slowing down the cds speed so that data can be written more tightly together. i dont see how that could damage the burner, but overburnt cds arent very reliable in my experience. hough im using a much older burner than most people. i got it while i was still in highschool, infact i got it the same time i got freespace 2 (christmas presants).
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The outer area on a given CD is reserved for the "Lead out" and as such no data can normally be written there. The purpose of the lead out acts as a sort of stop sign for the device reading the disc. The lead out space can be cannibalized by the wonderful process of overburning.
Many modern CD burners can handle overburning without a problem. I personally have never heard of a case where a drive was actually physically damaged due to overburning. I guess it might be possible if the writing laser is being forced to travel out to places it wasn't intended maybe causing the tracking mechanism to fail or get miscalibrated, but any quality drive would probably stop itself and give you the finger before running itself off a cliff.
99 minute CDRs are available (Around 870 megabytes although that'll vary a bit depending on the type of disc you're making) and might be worth a look. Cheaper media tends not to fare well with overburning either due to shoddy physical construction or quality issues on the outer portions of the disc - But don't blame them, you aren't supposed to be burning data there anyways.
The last thing is once you jump beyond 80 minutes the disc is technically no longer orange book compliant and as a result older drives, CD players, or just downright crappy drives will not be able to read all the data or may not read it at all. Orange book refers to the standards that define your garden variety CDR.
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actually, the first overburn I ever did, I was using a noname 74minute cdr (this was actually when 80min cdr's either didn't exist or was very expensive), and a burner and program without support for it... got in an extra 30 mb on it, got an error about it too, but the disc worked.
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It's a Lite-On drive, so it should be good quality. I just wanted to make sure because of that warning Nero gave me about it.