What the Drive information page in Burn by Zaweba tells you

Disc drives are easy to forget about until a burn goes wrong. Drive information, on the Tools menu of Burn by Zaweba, brings together what Windows knows about your writer and the disc in it, so you can see what you are working with before you start.

It is a read-only page. It changes nothing, which makes it a safe first stop whenever something seems off.

What the page shows

At the top is the writer itself: its model, its firmware and its drive letter. Then come the kinds of disc it can read and the kinds it can write, which is often the quickest way to answer whether a drive can burn Blu-ray or only DVD.

Next is the disc in the drive, if there is one, with its free space. After that are the write speeds the drive offers for that disc, including CAV, and whether the drive has buffer-underrun protection. Finally the page lists other optical drives on the PC, and virtual drives, such as those used when an image is mounted.

Reading the details

Reads and writes tell you what is possible. A drive that reads Blu-ray but only writes DVD will happily play a BD-R someone gave you but can't make one. Checking here before buying a stack of blanks can save a wasted purchase.

The disc and its free space tell you whether the blank in the drive is what you think it is, and whether a disc you plan to add to still has room.

Write speeds depend on both the drive and the disc, which is why the list is shown for the disc in the drive. CAV is one of the ways a drive can spin a disc while writing, and it appears in the list when the drive offers it.

Buffer-underrun protection guards against a burn failing when the computer briefly can't feed data fast enough. Most modern writers have it, and the page tells you whether yours does.

Firmware is worth noting when you are troubleshooting. If a drive struggles with a particular brand of disc, the model and firmware are the details any help page or forum will ask for.

A quick example

Say you have bought a pack of BD-R discs for an archive of photos. Before opening the pack, put any disc in the drive and open Drive information. If Blu-ray appears among the kinds of disc the drive writes, you are set. If it only lists CD and DVD, you know to plan the archive for DVDs instead, or to use a different writer, and the blanks can go back unopened.

When to open it

Open Drive information when a new writer has been plugged in, to confirm Burn sees it and what it can do. Open it when a burn fails or a check after burning reports problems, to make sure the right drive and disc are in use. And open it when you have more than one drive, to see them all together, including virtual ones from mounted images.

Related tools

The status bar shows the writer and the disc in it all the time, with an Eject button, and F5 looks for drives again if a drive has just been connected. Drive information goes further, for the moments you need the full picture. Together they mean Burn by Zaweba rarely leaves you guessing about the hardware.