With CD-R's you can only burn the files once. Once you burn something to it, it cannot be re-used. With the CD-RW disks, you can choose to format, or erase, it and re-write more stuff to it.

You can put any kind of files on the same disk if you want. It would just need to be a data disk. With this you can put anything on your PC on it.

YOu probably saw a 50 pack of CD-R's for $5, RW's are typically more expensive. Just take a look around and possibly CompUSA or Staples or Office Max/Depot have sales every once in a while on those. usually get them for free after rebate.

I hope this helps.

Basically you'll probably want to buy CD-R disks in bulk, by that I mean 50 or more at a time. CD-R will work in virtually every device that takes regular CDs whether they are data CDs or audio CDs.
I think you will want more CD-Rs just for their diversity and how cheap they are. Liquid is right on being careful about the quality, my burner will write to any cdr there is but sometimes that data isn't real reliable, for example when I burn an SVCD I sometimes have problems with playback on cheap CDRs.
In my opinion you are really wasting your money if you buy more than 5 or 10 CDRWs, they are really pretty useless. They have compatability problems with older computer cd drives, they don't play as audio cds on many home systems, although many new car audio cd players will play them. And really for their price you can buy 2 or more CDRs.

I would say the cd-r's last longer, but that doesn't mean they do. And as SNGX said I wouldn't really worry about getting the CD-RW's because as cheap as you can get a lot of CD-R's it's not worth it to have RW's. You can just make a new CD instead of rewriting a RW. I have gotten all of my CD-R's at about 5 cents per cd, or less. So in my case it isn't worth it to get RW's

Well from what I understand these 'studies' are not real reliable, the cdr and rw media hasn't been around long enough for real time studies, and they have instead been using simulated conditions to rack up the 'years' that the disk has been exposed to. I think what it really comes down to is that if you find a disk that will reproduce your files/media reliably initially (note: not all disks work equally well in all burners, see my SVCD example above) and if you take care of the disk, the disk will last as long as you deem that data relavent. I mean think about how many important documents you have that are over 5 years old that you havent' reopened or resaved in that time - I bet not many.
Point being that if something is vital, you will continually save it and should have it other places as well (hd, other cds, ect.)

I have CD-Rs that I burned back in 98 that are audio cds, burned on imation disks that still play fine in my cd players. So I think disks will last longer than you need if you take care of them.

Good point SNGX, simply putting them in cases and not throwing them around your desk will help prevent problems from occuring. Just take care of them and you shouldn't have to worry about it.

Hopefully my reply won't confuse things too much, but anyhow, you can delete files from CD-R discs too, if you use formats like Drag-to-Disc (formerly known as DirectCD). However, deleting files won't reclaim the space, the disc will just look empty.

No, you can burn multisession discs where the first track would be data and the rest audio, for example.

You can also burn multisession discs if you don't have enough data to fill a disc at once and you want to use its whole capacity. However, you can't read the disc until you've closed the session, ie. written the table of contents to the disc.

By the way, don't try to copy audio files (that appear as *.cda in Explorer) just like that. You need to extract the tracks to hard disk as wav files first (although burning application might do this for you, too).