First of all: what we tell about CDs is also valid or quite similar for DVDs.

Working with CDs asks for some special attention.

If you have a CD-writer, then you will have special software to be able to write to your CDs. In most cases however, this software is not compatible to Windows Explorer and is it impossible to copy or write to the CD like you would write to another drive like a hard disk, ZIP disk or Yazz disk. Also if you try to save a file (from a Microsoft office program like Word for instance) then it would not work.
Now, we have the same problem with SmartDirCopy.
However, there is a solution! There exists some CD writing software which makes standard software compatible to CDs. It is, among others, DirectCD from Roxio. DirectCD is a way to write files directly to a CD-Recordable (CD-R) or CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) disc much like you would to a floppy diskette or removable drive. It kind of changes the formats of the CD and with DirectCD itself in memory you can use also SmartDirCopy!
For download and further details on DirectCD, please search on Roxio. There are versions for both CD's and DVD's. For DVD-RW try Nero.