Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

Do combo movie-watching and music-recording drives have the write stuff? Apparently PC manufacturers think so. After a slow start, combination CD-rewritable and DVD drives are showing up in computers ...

In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit ...

eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More. If the new 52X CD drives could actually write at 52X ...

When I wrote a series of How-To guides showing how easy it was to swap old Mac hard disks for new solid state drives (SSDs), I focused on raw upgrades — slow mechanical drives for fast chip-based ones ...

it'll wear out just as fast as a cdrom drive will. there are different lasers for reading and writing (I'm 75% sure on this one) <BR><BR>oh, and pc world has not been a good source for about the last ...

search. It's been posted so many times already.<BR><BR>Put the 2 hard drives on channel 0, and the 2 optical drives on channel 1. <BR>You'll get better performance that way if you're writing something ...

Apple has finally started putting internal CD-RW drives in its new systems, but that’s of little comfort to those who own earlier Macs. If you long for the unlimited capacity, quick file sharing, and ...

The 1.44-megabyte floppy-disk drive is an endangered species largely because its primary predator, the CD-rewritable drive, uses media that can store up to 700MB per disk and costs only about $100. CD ...

An audio CD or CD-ROM that is cut into a non-round shape after it is pressed by the manufacturer or recorded on a CD-R. To avoid vibration in the drive, the shape is balanced as much as possible.