Superficially, there is little difference between the drives from CD through
Blu-ray. Only the capabilities differ. Generally, a drive that handles a
particular medium will also handle all media with lower capacities. The tray
door of the drive is imprinted with several logos indicating its capabilities.
A Blu-ray Disc drive
showing appropriate DVD and CD logos indicating its capabilities
Combo drives
Combo drives can usually read and write to all listed formats, except they
cannot write to the highest capacity. For example, a DVD-RW/Blu-Ray Disc combo
drive can read or write to DVDs and CDs but can only read Blu-ray Disc.
Installation
Early drives were installed, like IDE/ATA hard disks. They connected to the
ribbon cables and were configured as master or slave. Optical drives were
usually placed on their own controller port and cable. You shouldn't have your
optical media drive on the same cable as your primary hard drive. Data transfer
to and from an optical drive is slower than a hard drive and will monopolize the
cable when transferring.
Here is a typical
internal optical drive. Notice the small indent for 80 mm disks.
The above image shows a typical full-sized optical drive. Notice indents in
the tray for full-sized 120 mm disks and 80 mm Mini-CD disks. The indent for the
Mini-CD disks also accepts business card-sized disks. The tray usually has small
flanges to hold full-sized disks in place, with the tray open when the drive is
mounted vertically.
A typical laptop optical
drive
The above image is a typical notebook computer-sized optical drive. The disk
snaps onto the spindle, so no tray indents are required.
Newer optical drives connect to SATA ports like modern hard drives. The
mounting screws are smaller than hard drive screws (the same size as floppy
drives). Other than that, physically installing an optical drive is
straightforward. Software configuration, etc., will be discussed in operating
systems.
Manual Eject
If a disk has to be removed while the computer is turned off, the optical
drive tray has a manual eject system. Insert a stiff wire (such as a
straightened large paper clip) into this hole. Some systems engage a latch that
opens the drive tray (common with laptop drives). With other systems, the wire
engages with a gear that, when pushed, partly opens the tray. Several pushes may
be required to open the tray fully. Once the tray is partially opened, it can be
forced to open fully by pulling on the tray.
ATAPI
Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) is a standard for ATA
devices that are not hard disk drives, such as optical drives.
