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How can I speed up CD file transfers on my iMac?

Why does my iMac take so long in transferring files to a CD

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Aug 11, 2024 8:03 AM

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Servant of Cats

Level 9

55,737 points

Posted on Aug 11, 2024 8:29 AM

Burning a CD is inherently much slower than writing to a SSD or a hard drive. 1x speed for a CD is 150 KB/second. 24x speed for a CD is thus about 3.6 MB/second. A hard drive might operate at 30 – 100+ MB/second, while a SSD could operate much faster than that.

Many CD burning programs will read a CD immediately after burning it, to verify that the write succeeded. This will slow down things further.

In addition, how fast you can burn a CD depends on the lowest of

The maximum speed supported by the drive
The maximum speed supported by the blank CD
The speed you select

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How can I speed up CD file transfers on my iMac?

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