What is the difference between recording a disc image and recording on-the-fly?
In a recording application such as that of Windows XP, or another software application where the “Disc Image” option is selected, an image is created on the hard drive before the data is written to the CD-R/RW disc. This image contains the exact data structure that will be written to the disc. The advantage of staging a disc image on the hard drive, is that the data will stream off the hard drive, reducing the incidence of buffer underruns in those drives not supporting BURN-Proof (or a similar method for preventing this condition). A disadvantage in creating a disc image is that the hard drive must have the space available to store the image, often 800MB or more. In the case of Windows XP, the operating system creates a temporary cache in the boot sector of the hard drive for copies of the actual files to be used, as well as a temporary image file to be written elsewhere on the hard drive, thereby requiring 1.6MB, or more, of free hard drive space to write the disc image. When using o
