Optical Disc Drive Guide

Posted by ttblogger on 05/17 at 08:00 AM Discuss in Forums • Permalink
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Optical disc drives, you know CD-ROM type drives, are pretty much on all computers these days (except maybe netbooks - - where you may need to buy an external optical drive) . While this drive is extremely useful, some very common some questions still arise about them. In this Tech Tip we’ll be providing a refresh look at optical drives as well as looking at common failures and replacement strategies. 

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    Posted by Darrell  on  05/17  at  06:37 PM

  1. This was good. How about one on 32 bit & 64 bit operateing systems & the difference

    2. Posted by Joe Stoutenger  on  05/17  at  06:46 PM

  2. This is a good one.I remember thinking Zip Driving Floppy’s is soooo cool.My first Cd burner and throwing away so many cd disc thinking it was bad disc and it was the data (mp3’s) that was formatted wrong,Data types are what I’m typing about,if your using Album wrap then resize and reformat the music or data remember to unwrap first then do the resize and reformat otherwise you just made a album and don’t have singles,same with your data.Resizing your mp3’s (music in general)from like 320 bytesize down to 32bytesize then Zip,Rar,or Album wrap save mega space.I just bought new Memorex light scribe cd-dvd+-rom internal drive for Cee’s 4700 Dell it went in just like it was suppose to.works well burns great DVD’s,I love the light scribe labels(I love progress)Back to the data,I found when burning major amount of Data (Back Up game Files,Hack,Cheats,Installers..ie:Cee’s Sims Stuff)it won’t burn Beta on a plain jane 700mg disc.it wanted to be burned on a dvd disc.What I did was put the Beta Installers in a seperate file and it went ahead and burned all right.It said it would’nt or could’nt don’t believe it,when all was finished the Beta file was full and all the installers worked well.Thank for reading what I wrote...Peace...Joe

    3. Posted by Paul Callahan  on  05/18  at  03:36 AM

  3. After all is said and done why not tell them how to tell the difference between one drive and the other by the number of pins at the connection.

    4. Posted by Shodar  on  05/18  at  05:07 AM

  4. Just curious here, but the tech tip makes reference to a 9.4gig DL DVD? Largest I can seem to find is only 8.5gig… where might one find these 9.4gig Dual Layer DVDs?

    --Shodar

    5. Posted by Bill  on  05/18  at  07:16 AM

  5. Question on Blue Ray drives. I recently built a PC and chose to use XP OS. somewhere I read (or misread) that Blue Ray drives require Vista OS. Is this true? if so what of Linux users?

    6. Posted by Falkirk Computer Repair Engineers  on  05/18  at  02:28 PM

  6. I dont think thats true that blue ray won’t work on windows xp, theres no reason at all why this should be the case.. I’d be very surprised if it was as the drive itself contians the firmware and you just need blu ray authoring software that probably comes with the drive

    7. Posted by Bryan Lambert  on  05/18  at  03:30 PM

  7. Thank you all for the comments.

    For some specifics:

    1. That is actually a good idea.  I may put that into the rotation (pending editors approval of course).

    2. I also remember all the “data underrun errors” of some of the first gen burners.  Talk about making coasters.

    3. For the back of the drives, that is a good idea - unfortunately there is usually a difference between PATA for desktop and laptop - and PATA for optical laptop is different than hard disks.  Also, even though SATA in much more simple that PATA, even the optical laptop SATA is different (slightly) than the optical SATA desktop (further confusing matters is when laptop components are used in mini-desktop units)… As you can see, it gets complex very quick.

    4. Opps, sorry for the typo - yes the capacity is 8.5GB for a double layer.  That was totally my fault. Thanks for the sharp eye.

    5. XP does not natively support the file format used by blu-ray discs (UDF 2.5/2.6) while Windows Vista and Windows 7 does.  You CAN however get third party software and utilities that will help with this limitation (such as PowerDVD Ultra for movie playback and Nero 9 (with additional plug in) InCd or DLA for recording data).

    8. Posted by Johnson Yip  on  05/21  at  07:28 PM

  8. I like this article. I found the fixing and installing optical drives section of your article to be pretty useful.

    9. Posted by Ramiro Guzman  on  05/22  at  07:31 PM

  9. I don’t know too much about computers. I have an older computer running XP. I want to add a DVD/RW. Do you guys think I would be better off adding an external unit ? or does it really matter. It’s just that I don’t want to mess up anything inside, and just connect the external unit via USB and have less of a conflict.

    10. Posted by Pierce  on  05/23  at  10:44 PM

  10. Wow, never really knew this stuff… was always into the software side rasberry, thanks for the info.

    11. Posted by Johnson Yip  on  05/26  at  12:58 PM

  11. An external unit should work fine. Just make sure your older computer meet the hardware requirements for the external drive. Like having USB 2.0, 128 MB of ram, a 200 MHZ CPU.

    I heard Pioneer, Lite-on, samsung and LG make good DVD-RW.

    Internal DVD-RW cost less, but you have to install it yourself, so you have to open your case, set jumpers if it is IDE, plug in the power and data cables.

    External Drives can also be used with notebooks, and other PCs.

    If you can afford an external drive drive which cost around $100 then it be a good idea to get it since you can reuse it on multiple computers.

    Verbatim, TDK, and Tayo Yuden makes good DVD-R media disks.

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