But with the advent of the CDR and CDRW, they are really obsolescent. With a CDRW, you can reuse the disks. The faster the transfer rate, the better, so I prefer SCSI, but many people have reported great results with IDE burners. Well, since almost every computer today has a CD player, you can share anything you put on a CD very easily. And it is archival.
CDs are unaffected by magnetic or electrical fields.
As long as they are not scratched, broken or melted, they are readable, today or 100 years from now. Depending on how much you want to spend on your drive, a burner is probably the best choice for removable storage today. Using a burner is not as easy as the other devices we discussed which are basically used like a floppy or harddrive. Burning CDs is its own process, requiring its own software. It is not as difficult as it sounds, though, as you can find out for yourself in our CD burning tutorial.