Types of CD Drives
CD-ROM ... CDROM

Before you can pick CD ROM drives, you need to know a little about what types there are and what to use them for. It wouldn't hurt to know a little about what a CD-Rom is also.


Compact Disc Read Only Memory is the full term for the acronym CD-ROM. Read Only means you can't edit the information stored, it can only be read. Once saved, the CD stays that way.

CD’s are round flat discs that measure 4.7 inches in diameter. They hold in excess of 600 MB of data, that’s like a set of encyclopedias! If you used floppies to store the same date, you would need 400 floppy disks.

CD’s are ideal to store extremely large amounts of data including large images, animation, audio, and video. Buying the fastest drive your budget will allow gives you the speed you need to view and store many multimedia files.

What is a CD-ROM Drive?

CD ROM drives are hardware installed in your computer that reads data from a CD-ROM. CD drives are internal (fit in a drive bay), or external (plug in). Most drives connect to a parallel port or SCSI port.

The features of a CD-ROM drive helps categorize it, the most important feature is the speed. These drives come as single-speed, double-speed (2X), triple-speed (3X), quadruple-speed (4X), hex-speed (6X) or odo-speed (8X), deca-speed (10x), or triple quad-speed (12x). New multi-speed drives (20X, 24X, 32X) also significantly improve a system's performance when handling image files, but these generally cost a little more because they are new to the marketplace.

What's The Speed All About?

The speed of CD ROM drives are calculated in relation to the data transfer rate. The data transfer rate is how much data is read and relayed to the computer within a second. The data transfer rate is measured in bytes per second. You want to look for a higher data transfer rate plus shorter access time to get the best performing drive. For example, a CD-ROM with 900 KB/sec transfer rate can read and transmit 900K (921,600) to a PC within 1 second.

The speed is also measured in terms of its access rate. Access time is how long it takes for a drive to find the target data. The shorter the access time … the better the performance. "One third stroke" is a term often used when discussing access time. Stroke is the distance from the inner track to the outer track of a disk, meaning the time it takes to read data by scanning 1/3 stroke over the disk.

CD-R vs. CD-RW

In addition to standard CD ROM drives you can also purchase a CD-R or a CD-RW.

CD-R is Compact Disc Recordable and allows you to permanently store data on a CD by recording to it. This type of storage space makes it easy to transfer data intensive files like multimedia presentations, music files, and other software applications for backup or moving to other computers.

CD-RW stands for Compact Disc Rewritable and is similar to CD-R, but allows you to overwrite data on the CD as needed, so it works more like a floppy disk but holds a lot more information!

Another option is a DVD/CD-RW combo drive which gives you the best of both worlds with rewriteable CD drives and the ability to play DVDs as well.

DVD drives can play all CD's, but CD drives cannot play DVD's. Even with this limitation, you should have at least one dedicated CD drive.

My recommendation is:

1. Get the rewriteable (CD-RW) if you plan on using the CD's for backup or to transfer data from one computer to another;

2. Get the recordable (CD-R) if you want permanent copies;

3. If you may play DVD's, get the combo unit;

4. If you want the speed, go for the dedicated units and get separate DVD drives as well if you want it.

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