I have to respectfully disagree. Maybe I should have said
stress to the system instead of singling out just the disk,
but it has the same result, and is generally caused more
by the disk, or overheating of one "or more" components.

In DAO (disk at once) the TOC (table of contents) is written
first, like you said. The PMA (Program Management Area)
is checked.  When the burn is done, the PMA is not checked
to pick-up and update the TOC info because it was written
first.  Several disk and some drive problems are bypassed.

Sometimes in TAO (track at once), on cheap or marginal disks,
the heat from the laser will either heat the plastic enough to
change the disk characteristics or the calibration of the laser and
cause the final read of the PMA for the updating of and writing of
the TOC to fail... This causes a loss of the last session (and the
embedded imported session info), and accessibility problems
with former sessions. You would then need to "extract" former
sessions with a session selector program or recovery program,
or try to "force" the last session closed...  (Only if the PMA was
readable later...  This is a major cause of a session that will not
close or can not be forced closed.)

Note that ANY update of a disk, or adding a session on a disk
has a "more than zero chance" of causing a  loss of data, or at the
very least a loss of easy access to sessions already closed.
I just got done reading about how, for __maximum__ reliability,
a disk of any kind should be written to once, and not added to.
It the case above, the reading of the PMA and the adding of the
TOC last is more "stressful" to the disk (and system) than DAO.

For CD recording, (data only), on one end of reliability (or lack of)
you have DCD with compression and variable length packets on CD-RW.
On the other end (safest) you have mastering with DAO on CD-R.

I hope I have described this clearly.        Rick Glazier

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Delzer" <[log in to unmask]>
> Rick Glazier wrote:
> >
> > To test the media quick, do a small "test only burn" of a
> > small song or two, and DO NOT do it in Disk at Once...
> > This puts the disk under the most stress...
> > When actually burning, always use Disk At Once if you can,
> > or want to, to put the disk under less stress...
> > This is not a good substitute for good disks though...
> > It "might" just let a bad disk complete a burn to the end...
>
> Rick provided a lot of good info in his post, but I wanted to clarify
> one thing. The main difference between Disc At Once (DAO) and other
> record modes such as Track At Once (TAO) and Session At Once (SAO) is
> simply the order in which the disc is written. In TAO and SAO modes the
> data/sound track is written first, followed by the Table of Contents
> (TOC). In DAO mode, the TOC is written first, followed by the data/sound
> track. Neither mode puts any additional stress on the media.

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