On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, saber wrote: > I used to try to stay in the 630-640 meg range and I *would* end up with > coasters if I tried to do 650 megs. A friend had similar problems. More > modern cd-writers (his was '96, mine was '98?) may be more forgiving. OK -- that proves my point exactly! Sorry that you had to trim it down. > I always wondered if the ISO9660 filesystem was figured in as overhead. I don't know exactly what you mean by figured in, but absolutely. If you look at the raw number of pits made in a CD-ROM or CD-R or CD-RW, the amount of data that *could* be stored is about 2.4 GigaBytes. Of course, you'd never get that -- the error rates would render it useless. In essence, each bit is written 3 or 4 times, and that is sufficient to be sure that at least *one* of the copies will read correctly. [That's a mind numbing simplification of the error concealment and correction involved, but the ratio is about right.] I can cite references if anyone is interested in a little light reading on optical storage systems -- just e-mail me. Cheers, Phil -- Lottery: a tax on people who are bad at math --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org