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.

The most common types are CD, DVD and Blu-ray ... by USB-based flash drives and external hard drives. Following are the major categories of optical discs in order of writability.

To read from and write data to CDs and DVDs you will need a suitable drive. CD/DVD drives are able to: read all CD and DVD formats write to CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW Data is written to and ...

The decision is being made to curtail production across CD, DVD ... or larger portable hard drives, without the usual write-once limitation. As it turns out, though, optical media remains a ...