Which is better to buy for saving data on CD+R, CD-R, or CDRW? Also the same for DVD. The DVD will be for saving my home movies. DVD+R, DVD-R, or DVD/RW.
Go DVD for both and use the "R". RW will give you nightmares if you make a mistake. Weather you use -R or +R ,or both, is dictated by your burner and it's spec's. CDRW's and the like will be lost technology in 2 years. For that matter the current DVD format will die off in 3 to 4 years. 16X DVD burners are cheap right now. The next step is Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). It's a recording technique using collinear holography. It's a 2 layer recording format that will have the capacity to hold up to 3.9 terabytes (TB) of information. That's 830 times what a DVD (8.5 GB with Double layer) currently holds and 8 times the capacity of your typical hard drive. When HVD comes out you won't need a hard drive anymore. Don't buy into the HD-DVD that's currently available. It's not perfected and already dead in the water.
+R is supported by some burners and -R is supported by others. Studies have found that -R is the most compatable amongst all burners. In a 1000 unit test -R returned a 96.74% compatability. +R returned an 87.32% compatability. http://cdrinfo.com/Sections/Article... Compatibility Tests/Images/Sheet_Summary.gif So to answer your questions: 1. The main difference is which formats will your unit burn? Few units below a 16X speed support all the formats. Check yor specs. 2. -R is the best choice based on current tests. I need to add that if your compiling data for backup you will want to use the DL (Dual Layer) to get the most data you can on the disk. This is only necessary if you are backing up more than 4 GIG.
