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Concept
Optical disc drive
Summary
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers (since they physically burn the organic dye on write-once CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R LTH discs). Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
Although laptop manufacturers no longer have optical drives bundled with their products, external drives are still available for purchase separately.
most of the optical disc drives on the market are DVD-ROM drives and BD-ROM drives which read and record from those formats, along with having backward compatibility with CD, CD-R and CD-ROM discs; compact disc drives are no longer manufactured outside of audio devices. Read-only DVD and Blu-ray drives are also manufactured, but are less commonly found in the consumer market and mainly limited to media devices such as game consoles and disc media players. Over the last ten years, laptop computers no longer come with optical disc drives in order to reduce costs and make devices lighter, requiring consumers to purchase external optical drives.
Optical disc drives are an integral part of standalone appliances such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray Disc players, DVD recorders, and video game consoles. As of 2017, only the PlayStation and Xbox consoles are the only home video game consoles that are currently using optical discs as its primary storage format, as the Wii U's successor, the Nintendo Switch, began using game cartridges, while the PlayStation Portable is by far the only handheld console to use optical discs, using UMDs). They are also very commonly used in computers to read software and media distributed on disc and to record discs for archival and data exchange purposes. Floppy disk drives, with capacity of 1.
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