Optical drives let your computer read and interact with discs like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. While nearly every computer had them a few years ago, they're rare to see on new computers now. If you need ...

One truism about computer hardware is that, once purchased, it immediately starts falling behind the leading edge of the technology curve. Consider the Dual-2.0GHz Power Mac G5 I purchased in ...

One of the most interesting parts of the recent Apple Mac Mini and MacBook Air refresh is that Apple is moving away from optical drives. Apple isn't the only company to do so, raising the question "Is ...

You have it way easier these days, but back in the day, when you wanted to play a game on your PC, you had to take a similar ...

So I just hooked up my optical drive for the first time since moving to Windows 10. It's probably been about 18 months since I last used it, and I purchased it back in 2009. I ripped a new music CD I ...

These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has been the ...

Recently I had a conversation with a coworker who asked me about CD-ROM drives. They purchased a new PC a year or so ago and it does not have an optical drive. This wasn’t a problem until they came ...

If you used or owned a laptop in the 2000s, you'd probably remember that it sported either a DVD or Blu-Ray drive for popping in installation discs, movies, and even the occasional album from your ...

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.

Not entirely certain this is the appropriate forum, but I'm looking for a good/reasonable quality enclosure to repurpose one of the optical drives (CD/DVD RW) I saved from previous laptops. A quick ...

Against the flow of time and reason, Pioneer has launched a brand new optical disc drive. Pioneer's newest optical disc drive does more than just play Blu-rays, but will be able to burn large capacity ...

If you think it would be a good idea to print your business card on a specially cut, rectangular mini-CD, think again. Your contacts might never forget the headache of having the disc jam inside a ...