In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) 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, while other drives can both read and record. Those drives are called burners or writers since they physically burn the data onto the discs. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives. Although most laptop manufacturers no longer have optical drives bundled with their products, external drives are still available for purchase separately.
Drive types Some drives can only read data (CD,DVD,BD-ROM) whereas others can both read data and write data (CD,DVD-RW,BD-RE) to writable discs. Drives which can read but not write data are "-ROM" (read-only memory) drives, even if they can read from writable formats such as "-R" and "-RW". Some drives have mixed read and write capabilities, such as the TSST TS-LB23, which can only read Blu-ray discs but read and write CDs and DVDs. As of 2021, most of the optical disc drives on the market are DVD and Blu-ray drives, which read from and record to those formats, along with having backward compatibility with audio CD, CD-R/-RW, and CD-ROM discs. Compact disc-only drives (which cannot read/write DVDs) are no longer manufactured outside of audio devices and are obsolete in the consumer market for internal/external drives. Read-only DVD-ROM and BD-ROM drives are also manufactured, but are less commonly found in the consumer market, being mainly limited to media devices such as game consoles and disc media players. Most consumer-grade laptop computers used to come with built-in optical drives. Some laptop computers used modular systems (see Lenovo UltraBay). Throughout the 2010s, they ceased to come with built-in optical disc drives in order to reduce costs and make them lighter and thinner, requiring consumers to purchase external optical drives.
Appliances and functionality
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, 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 the only handheld console to use optical discs, using Sony's proprietary UMD format. 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 1.44 MB, have been made obsolete: optical media are cheap and have vastly higher capacity to handle the large files used since the days of floppy disks, and the vast majority of computers and much consumer entertainment hardware have optical writers. USB flash drives, high-capacity, small, and inexpensive, are suitable where read/write capability is required. Disc recording is restricted to storing files playable on consumer appliances (films, music, etc.), relatively small volumes of data (e.g. a standard DVD holds 4.7 gigabytes, however, higher-capacity formats such as multi-layer Blu-ray Discs exist) for local use, and data for distribution, but only on a small scale; mass-producing large numbers of identical discs by pressing (replication) is cheaper and faster than individual recording (duplication). To support 8 centimetre diameter discs, drives with mechanical tray loading (desktop computer drives) have an indentation in the tray. It can however only be used in horizontal operation. Slot loading drives, frequently used in game consoles and car radios, might be able to accept 8 centimetre discs and center the disc automatically. Optical discs are used to back up relatively small volumes of data, but backing up of entire hard drives, which as of 2025 typically contain many hundreds of gigabytes or even multiple terabytes, is less practical. Large backups are often instead made on external hard drives, as their price has dropped to a level making this viable; in professional environments magnetic tape drives are also used. Some optical drives also allow predictively scanning the surface of discs for errors and detecting poor recording quality. The drive reduces the rotation speed of discs when encountering damage, since a lower reading speed improves readability of damaged media. With an option in the optical disc authoring software, optical disc writers are able to simulate the writing process on CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW, which allows for testing such as observing the writing speeds and patterns (e.g. constant angular velocity, constant linear velocity and P-CAV and Z-CLV variants) with different writing speed settings and testing the highest capacity of an individual disc that would be achievable using overburning, without writing any data to the disc. Few optical drives allow simulating a FAT32 flash drive from optical discs containing ISO9660/Joliet and UDF file systems or audio tracks (simulated as .wav files), for compatibility with most USB multimedia appliances.
Key components
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
