Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Optical drives for computers come in two main form factors: half-height (also known as desktop drive) and slim type (used in laptop computers and compact desktop computers). They exist as both internal and external variants. Half-height optical drives are around 4 centimetres tall, while slim type optical drives are around 1 cm tall.
MS-DOS/PC DOS versions 4.0 and earlier assign letters to all of the floppy drives before considering hard drives, so a system with four floppy drives would call the first hard drive E:. Starting with DOS 5.0, the system ensures that drive C: is always a hard disk, even if the system has more than two physical floppy drives.
Optical discs are not prone to uncontrollable catastrophic failures such as head crashes, power surges, or exposure to water like hard disk drives and flash storage, since optical drives' storage controllers are not tied to optical discs themselves like with hard disk drives and flash memory controllers, and a disc is usually recoverable from a ...
An optical disc drive is a device in a computer that can read CD-ROMs or other optical discs, such as DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Optical storage differs from other data storage techniques that make use of other technologies such as magnetism , such as floppy disks and hard disks , or semiconductors , such as flash memory .
WORM drives preceded the invention of the CD-R, DVD-R and BD-R.An example was the IBM 3363. [1] These drives typically used either a 5.1 in (13 cm) or a 12 in (30 cm) disc in a cartridge, with an ablative optical layer that could be written to only once, and were often used in places like libraries that needed to store large amounts of data.
See also References External links A Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) A dedicated video bus standard introduced by INTEL enabling 3D graphics capabilities; commonly present on an AGP slot on the motherboard. (Presently a historical expansion card standard, designed for attaching a video card to a computer's motherboard (and considered high-speed at launch, one of the last off-chip parallel ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. 130 mm (5.25 in) and 90 mm (3.5 in) discs are the most common sizes. In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the compact disc , Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable ...