What is "Buffer protection" in CD burning software

What is Buffer protection? Can anyone explain when I should use this when burning CD/dvds? Should I always use it, only sometimes, or never at all?

 

Buffer protection (actually buffer underrun protection) basically protects your computer from misburned optical media. Without buffer underrun protection enabled, you must maintain an uninterrupted stream of data to the optical disc in order to burn correctly. If anything interrupts this stream, you can end up with read errors on the disc.

Buffer underrun technology tries to prevent this by either forcing the CD burn to slow down enough for the hard drive/system to keep up or by inserting pauses into the burn process (which can significantly increase burn time).

Buffer Underrun is not nearly as necessary today as it used to be, but it can still help to ensure you don't burn a coaster the next time you burn a DVD.

 

I recently burned an ISO disc. The instructions told me to disable buffer protection. Do you know why the instructions said this. Can one generally use buffer protection while burning an ISO disc without problems? (or is this a rule that one should always employ: disable buffer protection for ISO discs?)

Thanks for the info

 

Generally you can go either way with ANY burn, but the data in the ISO may have been sensitive enough that it couldn't afford "pause" buffer protection, since that has to insert extra data links that could end up affecting the ISO's integrity. Really, though, most modern computer can get away just fine without buffer protection.