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A disk drive is a device implementing such a storage mechanism. Notable types are hard disk drives (HDD), containing one or more non-removable rigid platters; the floppy disk drive (FDD) and its removable floppy disk; and various optical disc drives (ODD) and associated optical disc media.
In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disc 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 discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, while other drives can both read and record.
An Ultra Density Optical disc, or UDO, is a 133.35 mm (5.25") ISO cartridge optical disc which can store up to 30 GB (gigabytes) of data. The second generation UDO2 media format was introduced in April 2007 and has a capacity of up to 80 GB.
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 .
The format was standardized as EIA-741 and co-published as SFF-8501 for disk drives, with other SFF-85xx series standards covering related 5.25 inch devices (optical drives, etc.) [33] The Quantum Bigfoot HDD was the last to use it in the late 1990s, with "low-profile" (≈25 mm) and "ultra-low-profile" (≈20 mm) high versions.
In Unix-like operating systems, a device file, device node, or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS , OS/2 , and Windows .
It bypassed MS-DOS and directly accessed the disk, either via the BIOS or (preferably) 32-bit disk access (Windows-native protected mode disk drivers). This feature was a backport from the then-unreleased Windows 95 , as suggested by Microsoft's advertisements for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 ("the 32-bit file system from our Chicago project").
Optical discs can be reflective, where the light source and detector are on the same side of the disc, or transmissive, where light shines through the disc to be detected on the other side. Optical discs can store analog information (e.g. Laserdisc), digital information (e.g. DVD), or store both on the same disc (e.g. CD Video).