CD / DVD Drive

DVD Drive

A typical DVD drive can be seen on the right. These are usually installed inside the system unit and you only have access to the front of it so that you insert and remove a DVD ROM DISK.

The CD drive is similar to the DVD drive but is slowly being replaced with the DVD drive.

The CD drive replaced the floppy drive as a means of storage because it held a great deal more than the floppy disk could, the DVD drive has taken the place of the CD drive because it too can hold more than the CD drive.

Having said that they are CD drives and DVD drives, data (files and such like) can be written to (stored on) and read from (loaded from) the disks, they are actually CDRW's (CD Read Writer) and DVDRW's. DVD Read Writer), in this respect you can view them both as large capacity storage devices.

The only real consideration when obtaining a DVD drive is:

* The read / write speed - The faster this is the better