PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Burning On-the-Fly versus Burning Image Files

Broadly speaking, there are three ways to burn a CD-R disc, whether the source data is another CD or a random collection of files on your hard disk:

Burning on-the-fly

With this method, data is streamed from the source CD or hard drive, formatting and error-correction data is added in real time, and the resulting data stream is burned to the CD. The advantages of on-the-fly burning are that it is faster than other methods and it requires no extra disk space. The drawback is that on-the-fly burning is the method most likely to create coasters. Most recent systems are fast enough to dupe audio or data CDs on-the-fly successfully, but you may have problems if you attempt to write hundreds or thousands of relatively small files to a CD, as, for example, if you use your CD writer to back up your hard disk.

Burning true image files

This method uses a two-step process. Data to be written to the CD is first read and processed to add formatting and error-correction data. That formatted data is then written out to the hard disk as an ISO image file, which is an exact binary representation of the data as it will be written to the CD. The drawbacks to using true image files are that it takes longer and you must have enough free disk space to accommodate the image file, which can be 1 GB or more when you are copying audio data to an 80-minute blank. Against these disadvantages, burning a true image file is by far the most reliable method, particularly ...