Quick or Full erase of RW discs

[rich_jtg]

Hi,

Like alot of people, I tend to test my home creations on RW discs first before burning properly to save wasting discs.

I normally full erase these discs between use, but was wondering whether this was completely necessary.

Full erasing is obviously time consuming, especially when it comes to DVDs - is there any problems related to simply using quick erase instead?

Thanks.

[andkiich]

After the initial format, I've always used the quick format and have never had any problems.

[Skoorb]

I always use quick erase on both CD-RW and DVD+RW. I've had zero problems.

AFAIK, a quick erase just resets the titling for the disk. When you burn a disk, it puts in the ones and zeros (Actually I think it doesn't burn ones, just zeros, but that's besides the point and maybe I have it the wrong way around) throughout the disk. When you do a full erase it just uniformly resets all of these, but since a standard burn on top of old data (as long as you did a quick erase) will do the same thing, it seems to me that a full erase is a waste of time.

In fact while I'm thinking about it I'd suspect that full erase would add slightly more wear to the disk, since where the data resides on the disk would be doubly burned: once with the full erase, and once with the new write. Disks are good for 100-1000 burns anyway, so it's not really a concern.

[d_unbeliever]

no problem using quick erase

[rich_jtg]

Thanks for your replies folks... much appreciated.

It would appear that I'm going to save myself alot of time between edits!

[johns0]

You can save even more time by playing the VIDEO_TS folder with powerdvd or windvd before burning.