CD-DVD Disc Basics

CD and DVD drives are part of the optical drives group. Optical drives read information from a disk using a laser and optical lens. We will discuss how they work in future articles.

CD/DVD Drives are pretty much the same; both drives use a laser to read the disc. CD drives a have a single layer and DVD drives have one or more layers.

CD Disc can hold up to 700 MB of data, music or video.

DVD Disc (single sided/single layer) can hold up to 4.7 GB of data.
DVD Disc (single sided/double layer) can hold up to 8.5 GB of data.
DVD Disc (double sided/double layer) can hold up to 17 GB of data.

*note: not all DVD drives can read all DVD discs, check with your drives manufacture.

CD Drives come it three types

1. CDR: Compact disc reader, this drive will read discs only
2. CD-RW: Compact disc re-writable, this drive can read and write discs.
3. CD-RW +DVD: Compact disc re-writeable plus is can play DVD discs.

DVD Drives come in two types

1. DVD: Digital video drive, this drive can only read DVD and CD discs.
2. DVD-+RW: Digital video drive re-writable, this drive can both read and write DVD and CD discs. This is the preferred drive to have today.

In 2007 the next generation of drives are finally gaining ground. The new HD-DVD and Blue Ray Drives are becoming more and more common. This new technology uses a different kind of laser to read many more layers of data and give us much larger Discs capacity. Current discs can hold as much as 30 GB of data. Much larger disc up to 200 GB are soon to follow.

Many people may ask why do we need such large discs? The simple answer is the bigger we go the more data it takes. With HD TV and other media needing more space, large amounts of data are needed to create these new emerging technologies.

In future articles we will talk more about the new technologies.