Burning a CD a 600 MB CD-ROM, the burning software states that the CD does not have enough room even though it is a 650 MB CD-ROM.

Product: PaperFlow™

Last modified: September 21, 2022

Submitted: October 25, 2001

Version: 7.00

Article ID: PF000055

Burning a CD a 600 MB CD-ROM, the burning software states that the CD does not have enough room even though it is a 650 MB CD-ROM.main image

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Description

Sometimes when trying to burn a 600 MB CD-ROM, the burning software states that the CD does not have enough room even though it is a 650 MB CD-ROM.

Summary

This is a common error when the data group is full of smaller images, such as checks or 3x5 index cards.

The problem is that the smallest allocation unit on a CD-ROM is much larger than that of a hard disk drive. On a CD-ROM, sectors are written out in 8-bit chunks of data while on a hard disk drive they are much smaller. What happens is if you have a 9-bit piece of data, on the CD-ROM it takes up 2 sectors and counts as 16-bits of data. This means that if there are many smaller files, 4 or 5 KB in size, they will take up significantly more room on the CD-ROM than on the hard drive.

While this comes into play with regular documents as well, it is not noticeable and the 50 MB buffer automatically added by default is generally enough to make up for it. Unfortunately, the only way around this is to make the data group smaller. If the data group is nothing but checks, it is recommended to keep them around 300 MB in size.