Before we delve into the basis of CD-RW discs it is necessary to have crystal clear idea of CD-RW or else there can’t be any advancement. Compact Disc ReWritable (CD-RW) is nothing other than an optical disc format. CD-RW had its inception in 1997 and was known as CD-Erasable (CD-E) during its development. It was preceded by the never formally released CD-MO in 1988.

However, it is also true that CD-RW discs were never fortunate to have the extensive popularity of CD-R. What can be the main reasons behind this? While on one hand it was owing to their high per-unit price, on the other hand lower recording and reading speeds proved to be potent reasons of getting low status. Nevertheless, according to many experts compatibility issues with CD reading units, in addition to between CD-RW formats of different speeds specifications led to the degradation.

Apart from this, studies suggest in comparison to other forms of rewritable media for instance Zip drives, Iomega Jaz drives, Magneto-optical and flash memory based media, the CD-RW format makes use of the typical CD-ROM and CD-R file systems and storage strategies. These are basically unbefitting for frequent small-scale file additions and deletions and this reality makes the use of CD-RW as a true removable disk unfeasible.

CD-RW does consist of a shorter rewriting cycles life (ca. 1,000) weighed against almost all of the previously exposed types storage of media (typically well above 10,000 or even 100,000). But this is something less of a negative aspect as CD-RW discs are normally written and erased in their totality.