Why buy a CD burner rather than just adding a bigger hard disk?
Having lots of hard disk space is great, but there are still lots of reasons for having a CD burner: 1) Expandability – if you collect a lot of MP3, no matter how much hard disk space you add, you’ll keep filling it (to say nothing of other stuff…) A CD writer allows you to create an infinitely expandable library, with each disk holding about 650 Mb and only costing a couple of bucks. 2) You can burn audio CDs to play in your audio CD players. 3) Backup – hard disks can die… I know 🙁 Writeable CDs make a pretty good offline backup medium. 4) Portability – you can burn disks and take them to machines you have at other locations, or give them or mail them to friends. Certainly you want a decent amount of hard disk space, and adding a hard disk to an older machine can be worthwhile, if the machine looks like meeting your needs for a while in other respects. But adding hard disk space is not a direct substitute for having a CD burner.
