“Okay, I know you are tired of answering questions about CD-R performance problems, but this one seems really weird. I have had the same CD burn and software for three years now. During that time I have installed it on three different computers, each one faster and more powerful than the one before. In every case it works fine for several months, but then starts to gradually burn more and more bad discs, or fails during writing. I’ve already tried different media, but it doesn’t seem to get better or worse. What’s happening?”
The likely culprit is fragmentation of your hard drive. As hard drives begin to fill up with files it, over time, becomes fragmented, especially if files are frequently erased from the drive and new ones “recorded” in their place. As a drive fills up with material the fragmentation can reach a point where the overall performance of the drive is compromised enough that it can’t reliably stream data out to the CD burner at a rate sufficient to keep its buffer satisfied. At that point the burner can only stop writing, which ruins the disc. Normally your software will report a buffer underun error, but we’ve certainly seen instances where bad discs can be made by mechanisms that are running on the ragged edge without any errors being reported.
A different CD-R drive may be more able to overcome these interruptions in data by utilizing a larger buffer, but the real solution is to either defragment your hard drive, or completely erase it and start from scratch. Sometimes just moving the audio in question from one drive to another will help. There are a number of utilities available that will defragment the data on your drive. For the most part they work great and solve these problems. However, it can still be a good idea to completely erase and reformat the drive from time to time. There’s no substitute for starting with a clean slate every now and then. You’ll be amazed at how much better things work. Of course, if you have everything on one drive either of these courses of action is going to prove difficult and dangerous, which is one major reason why we always recommend a separate drive for your audio data. It’s definitely not a good idea to defragment a drive that has important information on it and isn’t backed up, so no matter what your circumstances you need to make a backup of the information before you do anything.