What's the fastest effective freeware out there for erasing re-writeable cd's please? Thanks.

'Quick erase' is always faster than 'full erase', with most software. What's the objective behind this particular erasing: security or simple re-use?

Simple re-use, thanks.

Burrrn is pretty fast at doing a quick-erase.

There you go...

Hehe, it's literally about 3 seconds. Almost as soon as you say yes to erase, it's done

Seeing that it's so fast, will there be any chance that the data on the disc could become corrupted? I have to ask becuase it's usually either music files or pics that I am copying to the cdrw in order to use again at a later date, will my files be ok?

The fast erase normally just wipes the table of contents (TOC). The actual data gets overwritten with the new data during the copying process.

This does mean that the TOC area of the disc gets twice as much stress as the data area, and theoretically halves the useful lifetime of the disc.

I suggest to do a full erase because is a better way to be sure that your data will be readable. A full erase do a sort of restore of the disc to the original state.

It's a longer way, but a safest one in my opinion

From the research I have done on this issue, yes, it suggests that as a "safety" measure, for my purpose, full erase would be best, I am glad that I now know that I have the option to use the Burrrn software to do quick erase when needed so that will come in handy [thanks guys] but does a full erase have to take 45 minutes or longer?

45 minutes?!

With 24x discs (and a burner that burns RW at that speed, of course) it takes me less than 10 minutes for a full-erase.

45 min or longer it seems a too long time. Erasing speed is related to the certified speed of the disc. I have 10x CD-RW media, and it take about 10 minutes to do a complete erase, the same as Arachne.

I'm not sure that can be related, but can you check if DMA is enabled?

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=101616

Yes, DMA is enabled, what I think makes the difference is which software you use to do the full erase, I use Musicmatch, can you guys list the different softwares you use for this so I can try them out to see which one is fastest please?

I've only ever done a full erase with Nero (6.6.x.x or 7.x.x.x).

What speed are your RW discs, and what speed does your burner burn RW discs?

Nero, dvdinfo pro are the two I use but the speed is about the same.

I use imgburn to do erasings.

Give it a try; it's free too

Would you believe it, I have both Nero and imgburn and never knew they had this feature and i have been using Musicmatch for years for this, oh well, never too late, thanks a million fellas!

You're welcome, though I'm not a fella...the other three are

*** JOKE MODE ***

This deserve surely a great...

Agreed!!

Interesting point.
Everything depends on we take as "full erase".
Fast format just erases TOC.
Full re-write, if its really full will write over previous info, so seeming effective...but will it resist those fancy forensic tools that digg down and find erased info?
I recall tools that used to says to write zeros over the previous info with seven passages, even saying this was used by such&such to show how good the process was. Ok, this was for magnetic supports.
But will it apply to optical media? Something like this would take the 45 minutes or even longer.
At the end, if you want full erase data the better is to destroy the media to very small pieces and throw them away to dif locations...effective and paranoic.