I've never quite got this speed burning issue. Surely its a fairly well known fact, that the faster you burn a CD, the more chances of it failing (reliability wise). Secondly, the faster the speed, the less difference in actual burning time.
I've actually heard the exact opposite. When I first bought my 4x Lacie USB burner several colleagues told me this was a big mistake because the information should be burned as quickly as possible, especially when you are dealing with numerous small files. My PC laptop will burn CD's at 28x through its internal writer and with buffer under run enabled, I think its working at about 16x in practice and has never had a failure compared to my Lacie, which although it is reliable mechanically and an excellent reader, has been known to fail just because it is so slow at getting the information onto the CD. In my experience, its the quality of the CD's themselves that is important rather than the speed at which they are written to maintain safe data. Is there somebody knowledgeable who can say whether there is a safest reliable speed to burn CD's at? I can remember some cheap CD's that were failing constantly on my Lacie even at 2x, but the Sony have always seemed like a good bet.
Now OK, I rarely burn a full CD, usually my jobs fit on about half the space. But as I want the CD not to fail, I tend to burn it at either 8x or 12x. As my desktop G4 has an 8x burner built in, I use that. The 12x firewire has been in its case for months now. OK I have to wait 5 minutes while it burns, but it does it in the background (on OSX) so who cares, I'm doing other things while its chugging away.
Do people really need all that speed? I certainly don't. Perhaps people are busy burning all those archive CD's? But in that case, most definitely one wouldn't be risking burning them at full speed, would they?
OK that's fine, but I tend to find that I only burn CD's when they are nearly full if possible and I like to verify them to feel safer. On a 4x burner with close to 700MB of data, each one is going to take almost 40 minutes doing that. If I could burn and verify on a much faster writer that could all be done in around 6 to 8 minutes. This may not seem like a lot when its just one, but when you have to back up data or make a lot of CD's for whatever reason or may even just have a deadline to meet and would appreciate getting a couple of hours sleep that night, that's a great deal of time which can be saved.
Ashley
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