Optical Disk Drive




Optical Disk Drive

A user mounts an optical disk on an optical disk drive for reading/writing of information from/to it. An optical disk drive contains all the mechanical, electrical, and electronic components for holding an optical disk and for reading/writing of data from/to it. It contains a tray on which the disk is kept, read/write beams assembly, and motor to rotate the disk.

An Optical Drive refers to a computer system that allows users to use DVDs, CDs and Blu-ray optical drives. The Drive contains some lenses that project electromagnetic waves that are responsible for reading and writing data on optical discs. Optical drives are integral parts of electronics devices such as VCD players, CD players, Blu-ray players, DVD players, and certain video games consoles such as Microsoft Xbox one, Sony PlayStation 2, 3&4 and Nintendo Wii U.

Nowadays Optical drives are become less common due to the revolution of better data management systems and storage devices. Some optical Drives such as the CD writer drive, CD ROM drive, and combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW are longer manufactured or supported by most PC manufacturing companies. DVDs have a storage capacity of 4.7GB and can be used to store data for various uses. For you to write content/data to a disc, you will need a blank recordable DVD disc. DVD optical drives write data to CDs by heating the organic dye layer parts of the discs; they use a laser that changes the reflectivity of the dye.

What are optical drives?

In the simplest terms, an optical drive is the piece of hardware that lets a device read and interact with a disc. These discs can be CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, game discs, and more. All optical drives are based on the same fundamental technology. An optical drive is composed of a laser that's used to read and write data that's encoded in a plastic disc which spins on a platter. Depending on the specific kind of optical drive - CD, DVD or Blu-ray - the wavelength of the laser will vary, along with the rotational speed of the disc.

The CD was the first kind of optical disc, initially designed without regard for computer storage. The first prototype arrived in 1979 to play back music but was adapted into the CD-ROM format in 1985, capable of storing 700MB of data, which at the time was substantially more storage space than commonly available in hard disk drives (HDDs).