Burning ISOs at slowest speed?

[Tsarevich]

I read in SuSE forum a sticky thread by oldcpu. He said burn your ISOs at slowest possible speed. I will soon be burning FreeBSD ISOs. I never read anywhere what he says. Is he right? (I burnt a Freespire CD at the fastest speed and the resulting CD was very fast at installation (only 7 mins at my shitbox) However, the CD had bugs. Were the bugs due to fast writing speed or the ISO itself? (the md5sum was correct).

[elija]

Normally you can burn iso files to cd at a fast speed. Sometimes due to the compression used in the file this can cause disk errors on the CD. The slower you burn the less likely you are to get corruption.

Just because you burn it slowly doesn't mean it will read slowly.

[oz]

I generally burn close to the fastest speed possible without having errors creep in. If a burn produces errors, the speed is decreased as needed. If errors continue to come regardless of the speed used, it's pretty clear that there is something else wrong.

You can check this HowTo for making sure you properly download the ISO files and burn them as images to the disk:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ins...ll-cd-dvd.html

[elija]

Yeah, I have rarely had problems but I don't use the cheapest media so that might have something to do it

[oz]

Yeah, I have rarely had problems but I don't use the cheapest media so that might have something to do it

I too generally try to use higher quality media. Sometimes, I'll use the cheaper stuff on burns that are of little importance.

[Tsarevich]

I bought three CDs which are 1x-48x compatible. Burning at 1x will be a great waste of money (my drive supports upto 4x of burning). Does that mean that the read speed will still be 48x (or upto the capacity the drive supports? Moreover, will burning at 1x save my future evenings? What do you recommend for me? 1x or 4x?

[oz]

If your drive is capable of reading at 48x there shouldn't be any problem with it doing so if the media is 48x read capable, as well.

I'd recommend burning at the fastest speed that your drive will burn without producing errors. It might take some trial and error to find what speed that is with any particular media.

[elija]

The speed you write the disc at has no bearing on the speed you can read the disc at. All it affects is how long it takes to burn...

[Dapper Dan]

Over the years, I've had enough problems with burns at higher speeds to know this to be true. As a result, I always burn at the slowest possible speed to ensure the least amount of problems. Just this morning, I burned CRUX 2.5 .iso at 6x.

[Bemk]

The other day I tried to burn Ubuntu 9.04 and forgot to set the speed to the slowest. Result, you guessed it, a completely wasted disk as it produced kernel panics.

I had to burn the disk again, but this time I set the speed to 4.5x, and it worked like a shine. (same iso)