CDs vs DVDs which one for your custom project?

Wow, would you believe the CD disk was created way back in 1985, and DVDs won their media battle back in 1993? Wait – that means CDs and DVDs are different, right? Right!
They look the same, feel the same, weight the same. So what’s different? Well, there are differences and they’re significant.
STORAGE SPACE
A CD disk will hold about 700 MB of data. That’s about 500 photos, 100 MP3s, 250 PowerPoint presentations, 1000 documents, 4,000 Excel sheets or ¾ hour of video.
A DVD will hold about 4.7 GB, about six times the storage space of a CD. And let’s just say that’s a lot of photos and it’s virtually hours of video.
USES
CDs were originally created for music, and today they’re the media of choice in the music industry. They’re also widely used for computer software distribution, although primarily for smaller programs that fit onto one disk.
DVDs were made for bigger things, and today we see them used primarily for videos. That’s because videos consume huge quantities of memory, and at six times the storage capacity of a CD, the DVD disk happens to have plenty of memory. DVDs are also popular in the computer software distribution market because one DVD has enough space/memory to hold a large software program all by itself.
But if they’re both the same physical size, how can a DVD hold so much more data than a CD? Because DVDs condense the data by narrowing the pit length, width and depth, using shorter laser wavelengths, increasing the rotational speed and in turn raising the data read rate.
(Don’t ask what those are if you don’t already know. It’s enough to understand all that stuff is stuffed tighter on a DVD disk than on a CD disk.)
Another reason DVDs can hold more than CDs is the disk’s ability to record data on both disk sides and in two layers on each side. With these options, a single DVD’s storage capacity increases from 4.7 GB for one-side-one-layer all the way to 17 GB for two-sides-two-layers, nearly four times its original capacity.

Here’s something you might not know: you can play your DVDs in either a DVD or CD player, but you can only play your CDs in a CD player. Or maybe you’ve already learned that through experience.
Another little-known disk fact: the average, run-of-the-mill CD and DVD disks have a life span of 3-5 years. That means you don’t want your valuable and priceless data to sit in storage on a disk forever – until now. Today there are disks on the market with 100-year lifetime guarantees, thanks to accelerated aging tests.

That’s the basic information, the real down-and-dirty difference between CDs and DVDs, which you now know were created for very different uses. Will you use CDs or DVDs for your next project? It will depend primarily on data type and size. And since you’re now so well-informed, our job here is done and you’re ready to go forward!