Do regular DVD recorders use a hard drive?

Question

There are regular DVD recorders and there are DVD recorder combos that have a built in hard drives to be used as TiVos. My question is: Do the regular DVD recorders use a hard drive to accomplish their tasks? For example if you use a Phillips DVD recorder, you can record programs on a DVD-R and delete any chapters if you like before finalizing the disk. This must mean that the recorder contains your program within itself until the finalizing process. Otherwise, how could something be recorded and then deleted from a DVD-R? It is obvious that once you record something on DVD-R you cannot replace it with anything, but the DVD recorder does just that. If so (if it really does have a built-in hard drive), then how do I know the limit on the recording length that I have. For example, I might be using a new DVD-R that has 8 GB of storage space but my DVD recorder may not be capable of executing something so long. How wouuld I know its limits? Thank you for your time in answering my question!

Answer 1

The DVD recorder records the chapters and then when you "delete" them the recorder just writes the Menu and directory track with that chapter removed.  You are right in saying that once it is recorded it can't be replaced.

If you want to record on an "8 GB" disc, your recorder will have to support the dual-layer discs in order to store 8GB.

Phillips makes DVD Recorders that have hard drives, but they are called Hard disk Recorders.