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Yeah I'm not gonna lie this is me. I've burned iso's to CDs before but I really not get it. The cds I had could only be burned once and then got write protected and I didn't know how to undo to. I'm just gonna stick with my flash drives
They're not "write-protected", they're literally a write-once medium. The name "burner" isn't a metaphore, that's actually what they do.
Tbf there are absolutely rewritable CDs and DVDs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-RW
Though compatibility with regular players was a bit of a crapshoot.
That's true. CD-RW "burners", to keep accurate phrasing would've been well described as "melters". They melted the medium, and erasing it was just melting it back.
I still miss them, so convienent in the mid 2000s era cars that could play CDs loaded with decent quality MP3s.
But I remember you could only do it X times before you'd actually be able to corrupt your data. Never had that happen, but it always felt a bit scary.
To be fair, practically every medium from tape to HDD to SSD has a limit. But CD-RW was a lot more vulnerable to data loss in my memory.
There was some kind of “append” mode on CD-R though
Correct, but only if the disk did not get finalized. Most cd burning applications and what was built into windows towards the end of that being relevant allowed for burning some data without finalizing the disc, but that is not the case generally when you are burning an iso.
Oh haha, I didn't know that
Flash drives are definitely better than burning ISOs to disc, but don't forget that we had CD-RW discs that allowed multiple burns.
Just in case you don't already know this: of you're frequently fiddling with ISO files on a flash drive, go check out Ventoy! It lets you put multiple iso files directly on the drive and will offer a boot menu of which one to use. It's brilliant. Plus you can still use the rest of the space on the stick for regular storage as usual.
In HS photography class the teacher gave us CD-RW discs to use as flash drives to keep our pictures on and they actually lasted all semester using them every day.
i never thought the rw discs worked well enough to be trustworthy but for the application you described ie not critical it did the job. damn i remember those days. so glad about usb drives and now i guess everyone just uses cloud.
Just lol
CD-R vs CD-RW.