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Laptop Optical Drives
There was a time when laptops did not come standard with optical drives. Yes they actually came with a floppy drive and that was all. These days they don't even come with a floppy drive. Unlike the early days of computing, manufacturers and retailers of laptop parts offer many different types of optical drives for your laptop, and they all have many different functions, so let's have a look at them.
CD Drive: This optical drive was used in the early days, and can still be found on some old laptops. It can read a CD ROM, and that's it. It began at speeds of 1x, and eventually worked its way past 52x. There were many different iterations of this device, the earliest being a cartridge that you would slide into your CD ROM bay containing the CD that you wanted run or listen to.
DVD Drive: This rapidly became a replacement for the standard CD ROM drive. Though there were many who believed that it could only read DVD's, it could in fact read both CD's and DVD's, effectively making the CD Drive obsolete. Newer DVD drives support burning of DVD-R and DVD+R discs, allowing for greater storage. The discs also come in Single-Layer and Dual-Layer versions, allowing for twice the storage, but at a premium price.
Blu-Ray drive: Blu-Ray is the next generation of optical media, set to replace the DVD as the standard for movie storage. These drives are becoming more common in higher end multimedia laptop machines.
Blu-Ray still has yet to establish itself as a storage platform, and as hard drive storage and flash drives become more affordable, many question whether optical drives will be necessary in the near future.
If you have questions about the compatibility and availability of a specific optical drive for your laptop, contact the manufacturer or an authorized laptop repair center. |