In computing, an optical disk drive (ODD) is a disk 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 disks. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can read and write, also called recorders or recorders. Compact discs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media that can be read and recorded by such drives. Optical disc drives that are no longer in production include a CD-ROM drive, CD recorder, combined drive (CD-RW / DVD-ROM), and DVD burning drive that supports certain recordable DVD formats, and rewritable (such as DVD-R), DVD + R (W) only, DVD-RAM only, and all DVD formats except DVD-R DL). Starting in 2015, the DVD writing drive supports all existing recordable and rewritable DVD formats is the most common for desktop and notebook PCs. There is also the DVD-ROM drive, BD-ROM, Blu-ray Disc (BD-ROM / DVD ± RW / CD-RW) disc and Blu-ray disc.
Optical disc drives are an integral part of stand-alone devices such as CD players, DVD players, Blu-ray disc players, DVD recorders, certain desktop video game consoles such as PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox One, Nintendo Wii U and Sony PlayStation 3, and certain portable video game consoles, such as Sony PlayStation Portable. They are also used very commonly in computers to read software and means of consumption distributed in disks and to record discs for archival and data exchange purposes. Floppy disk drives with a capacity of 1.44 MB have become obsolete: optical media are cheap and have a much larger capacity to handle large files used since the days of diskettes, and the vast majority of computer writers High capacity, small and economical USB flash drives are suitable when read / write capability is required.
Disk recording is limited to storing files that can be played on consumer devices (movies, music, etc.), relatively small data volumes (for example, a standard 4.7 gigabyte DVD) for local use and data for distribution , but only on a small scale; producing large quantities of identical disks is cheaper and faster than individual recording.
Optical disks are used to back up relatively small data volumes, but the backing of entire hard disks, which from 2015 typically contain hundreds of gigabytes or even several terabytes, is less practical. Large backups are often made on external hard drives, as their price has fallen to a level that makes it viable; In professional environments magnetic tape drives are also used.