Optical disc drive

An optical disc drive is a type of storage device that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves near the light spectrum as part of the process of reading and writing data. Some drives can only read from optical disc media, but commonly drives are both readers and recorders. Optical drives that are able to write to writable disc media are called writers or burners, examples are the CD-RW, DVD/CD-RW COMBO and DVD burner. Compact discs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.

Optical disc drives are used in computers to read software and consumer media distributed in disc form and to record discs for backups and data exchange. Optical drives have mostly displaced floppy disk drives and magnetic tape drives for this purpose because of the low cost of optical media and the near-ubiquity of optical drives in computers and consumer entertainment hardware.