about how many times can you blank a cd-rw disc before it fails???

could you elaborate a little bit on the implications of using blank=fast and blank=all in relation to this???

thanks...

Well, i guess blank=fast only deletes the FAT part of the disk, so in fact you're overwritting the CD.
blank=all i suppose physically deletes the data by making a flat layer on the disc, so it is as it has no data in it.
This is only a guessing, but it seems reasonably to me

thanks for you reply, hammett...

how many times (aprox.) would i be able to do a "blank=fast" compared to a "blank-all"???

i've been blanking a cd-rw with "blank=fast" quite a few times with no problems, but i had another one that i used with "blank=all" and i was only able to do that a few times before the cd died...

I really don't know...i suppose it depends on each CD, but i really have no idea. Sorry. Maybe in the homepage of the manufacturer you can find the answer

okay i took your advice and it seems like what i'm talking about is called "overwrite cyclability" or something...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...ty&btnG=Search


from what i'm seeing on google it looks like most of the cd-rw discs nowadays have an overwrite cyclability of "more than 1000"...

so i guess my question now is: how does overwrite cyclability relate to "blank=fast" versus "blank=all"???

The correct answer is 32 .... you can blank a disk 32 times. Its an exact science.


-GSD

AFAIK, when you burn a CD you're actually doing small holes on the disk with the laser beam. I guess that blank=all what does is remove those holes by making the CD flatter, so you can do it 32 times before the laser beam is able to do more "holes" on the surface of the disk.

blank=fast overwrites the TOC and the pregap, blank=all overwrites the entire disk, which is why it takes 30 minites as opposed to the 2 minites of blank=fast.

(look at the cdrecord man page, i basically paraphrased it)

but to the how many times thing, i dont know, all i know is that I dont use blank=all except when the disk has read/write errors, then it fixes it.... but for just blanking a disk i use blank=fast, which just deletes the "superblock" so the computer reading it wont be able to read the filesystem (under normal circumstances, there are forensics tools out there that can do it (i assume))

so yeah, blank=fast can be used quite a lot, when it starts to kill the disk you'll see it because you will start to lose data on the disk, writing quality will get poor, and sometimes (esp. if you have a bad cd drive), you wont be able to mount the disk at all.....

EDIT: lol i quoted the wrong post...
EDIT 2: mmmm..... i tried to fix it and i did the same post again..... that earns me a newbie smilie face....