Data storage devices-Optical disks drives

What are the Optical disk drives

Optical disc drive is a drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves for reading and writing data to or from optical disc.

Optical media types include:

Compact discs (CD)
DVD
Blu-Ray discs,
Universal media discs,
High-Definition Versatile Discs
and so on

Most internal drives for personal computers, servers and workstations are designed for a standard 5.25" drive bay and connect to their host via ATA and SATA interface.

CD-ROM drives. CD-ROM is an acronym for Compact Disk Read-Only Memory. CD-ROMs are used to store applications or data in such forms as video, sound and animation. CD-ROM drives can only read information from compact disks (CD).

CD-R and CD-RW drives (burners). With CD-ROM drives you can play CD-ROMs on your computer, CD-R drives allow you to create your CD-ROMs. CD-R is short for "CD-Recordable". Recordable CDs are called also as WORM (Write Once, Read Multiple) media that work just like standard CD-ROMs. The main disadvantage of CD-R drives is that you can't rewrite CD-ROM. CD-RW (Rewritable) drives allows you to write discs, then erase and rewrite. They are also called CD-E (compact disk-erasable). CD-Rewritable drives are able to write both CD-R and CD-RW discs. Media for CD-R and CD-RW drives are blank CD-R or CD-RW.

DVD Digital video (versatile ) disk (DVD) drives realize the next generation of optical disc storage technology. DVD is essentially a bigger, faster CD that can hold cinema-like video, better-than-CD audio, and computer data. DVD aims to encompass home entertainment, computers, and business information with a single digital format, eventually replacing audio CD, videotape, laserdisc, CD-ROM, and video game cartridges. You can meet six recordable versions of DVD-ROM: DVD-R for General, DVD-R for Authoring, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD+R. All DVD recorders can read DVD-ROM discs, but each uses a different type of disc for recording. DVD-R and DVD+R can record data once (sequentially only), like CD-R, while DVD-RAM, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW can be rewritten thousands of times, like CD-RW. DVD-RAM is more of a removable storage device for computers than a video recording format. The other two erasable format families (DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW) are essentially in competition with each other. The market will determine which of them succeeds or if they end up coexisting or merging.

Blue-ray is name of a next-generation optical disc format that has more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVD and can hold up to 25 GB on a single-layer disc and 50 GB on a dual layer disc.. This format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video, as well as storing large amount of data. Recently Pioneer has revealed that they developed a Blu-ray disc that can store 400GB of data on 16 layers.

By functionality optical drives include:

players,
recorders or burners
dublicators.