Optical disc drive
An optical drive is usually a CD drive or DVD drive. Optical means it uses lenses. The drive uses a light called a laser. A laser is the most exact and powerful sort of light but the laser in the drive is very, very small. The CD or DVD disk is similar to a mirror and the laser light reflects off it. The disk has very small (microscopic) codes written on it. The drive has a very small camera lens beside the laser which can read the codes. Another part of the drive is plugged in to the computer by a wire (inside) and the code goes through the wire as a signal to the computer.
List of optical drives
- CD drive
- DVD drive
- Blu-ray Disc drive
- HD-DVD drive
- LaserDisc drive
Optical Disc Drive Media
The 12 centimetre slot-loading optical drive of the Nintendo Wii game console is compatible with 8 centimetre diameter discs to support GameCube discs (RVL-001 model only), the predecessor game console, allowing for backward compatibility.
Some optical drives support measuring the error rate in the error correction code. An individual error does not cause data loss yet, but a higher rate means the error correction mechanism is more strained, which can predict a possible age-related future data loss. The depicted rate is well within a healthy range.
Sharp laser optical assembly. All 6 focusing and tracking coils can be clearly seen.
Optical pickup unit with two visible potentiometers
Philips CDM laser assembly.
The optical sensor out of a CD/DVD drive. The two larger rectangles are the photodiodes for pits, the inner one for land. This one also includes amplification and minor processing.
CD disc, which exploded in an optical disc drive.
Opening the tray of a CD-RW manually with the help of a paper clip
Digital audio output, analog audio output, and parallel ATA interface
