I work at a PC sales/repair shop during holidays. From what I've seen, CDRWs are usually not worth it for the general public.
If you are downloading ISOs, especially for Linux distros, there is almost always an MD5sum file for each ISO. It's a cryptographic checksum that can usually tell if your ISO is corrupted at your end (the MD5sum is only a few KiB).
I've seen more than one business use CDRWs for daily backups. The person doing the backups just leaves the CDRW sitting on top of the PC, not in it's case, and after a while when they do need to recover data the CDRW is useless.
I read somewhere that CDRWs have only 40% reflectivity of a pressed CDROM (CD-Rs were something like 70%). So scratches, dust, fingerprints affect them more. And if you are adding to a CD using multisession or even worse - UDF packet writing software, the file system/TOC area becomes more complex - small errors in these places could confuse a computer easily.
So unless you're testing an AROS or a KNOPPIX distro regularly, I wouldn't bother :-)
I hope AmigaOS4 will support USB Flash drives...
- Paul
