Optical Drives

In this video from ITFreeTraining, I will have a look at optical drives. Optical drives don’t have the market share that they once did; however, you will find that they still get used in some cases particularly in business, but optical media market share is falling.
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Let’s have a closer look at how the laser works. Firstly, let’s consider an optical disc. A laser is needed to either read or burn to the optical disc. The laser will need to be focused, thus the assembly contains a lens to do this. All these parts are manufactured inside a housing. Thus, there are no servable parts inside, since the housing is generally incased in plastic, thus you won’t be able to access them.
That is the basics of how an optical drive works, so let’s now have a look at the differences between different optical drives.
Now that we have a basic understanding of how optical drives work, let’s have a look at what types are available.
The next type are portable drives, for example USB. There are also portable drives that support interfaces like Thunderbolt. In this case this optical drive is USB 3. This optical drive has two plugs which are the type A and the type C connector. The second plug in this case is only for convenience as only one is required to operate it. USB 3 provides more power than USB 2, but in the case of this optical drive, only one plug is required even if it is operating with a USB 2 connection.
The next type of portable optical drive that I will look at is USB 2. You will notice, in this case, there are two USB plugs. One is for power and the other one is for data. If you come across an optical drive like this one, in order for it to operate, it needs both USB plugs plugged in. Keep this in mind if you come across an optical drive with two USB plugs, depending on the optical drive, both may be required to be plugged in for the optical drive to operate.
The last type of optical drive that I will look at is an internal laptop optical drive. These optical drives are used in older style laptops. They could be easily installed or removed from the laptop. With the reduced use of optical drives, you don’t see them used in laptops anymore. If an optical drive is required for a laptop, they are generally an external USB or are fixed inside the laptop.
Since optical drives have been around for a long time, the technology has matured so much that if you are purchasing a new optical drive, the only real features that you need to worry about is if it is internal or external and if it supports DVD or Blu-ray. Blu-ray drives are more expensive than DVD drives. If I am purchasing one for home, I will generally purchase a good external Blu-ray drive so I can use it on any computer that I wish. For business, often a DVD drive will be good enough as Blu-ray did not really take off in the business world. To be honest, DVD drives are slowly disappearing from the business world as well.
However, if you are working in IT support and someone requests an optical drive, they all look pretty similar. I will now have a look at what you need to look at when picking an optical drive.
In some cases, it may not be so clear by looking at the optical drive, what it supports as there will be no logos on the front of the drive. When this occurs, you will need to look at the rest of the drive for clues like the stickers on the drive. In the case of this drive, a small part of the stickers says “Super Multi DVD Writer” letting us know that is a DVD optical drive. The word multi, unlike combo, means that the drive supports burning for CD and DVD.
Combo drives, although rarer nowadays then they used to be, are still sold, so keep this in mind when purchasing an optical drive. A combo drive will be able to read newer media and older media but will only be able to write to older media.
That concludes this video on optical drives. I hope you have found this video useful, and I look forward to seeing you in more videos from us. Until the next video from us, I would like to thank you for watching.
References
“The Official CompTIA A+ Core Study Guide (Exam 220-1001)” Chapter 6 Paragraph 231-244
“CompTIA A+ Certification exam guide. Tenth edition” Page 436
“Blu-ray” en.wikipedia.o...
“Picture: Blu-Ray Laser” en.wikipedia.o...
“Picture: Difference between different optical burners lasers” upload.wikimed...
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[@colinreece3452]

Recently my daughter bought a new laptop and needed to install some software she had from her old PC, it was on a DVD disk, luckily I had an external drive she could plug in via the USB. Also even now some devices are sold with an instalation disk, I know a lot of times you can download the drivers but sometimes it needs a search and not always you can find the right driver.

[@itfreetraining]

Sometimes that optical drive comes in handy. If you use the optical disc drivers, it is generally worth getting Windows to try and update them once you install them. The optical disc drivers can be very out of date, but better than nothing to get you started.

[@ionutvrabie4920]

Thank you 😁

[@itfreetraining]

You're welcome!

[@tomasplunksnis1087]

3:12 Where’s the obsolete Internal IDE optical drive?

[@itfreetraining]

IDE is obsolete nowadays. It is still an exam objective so we do talk about it in the IDE video. Your best of using SATA nowadays. Optical drives are pretty cheap.

[@jrapplefan2231]

My problem with Blue Ray and HD drive is that we need to pay 100$ to 200$ for a program able to decript and read those DVD. Are there some good and free ?

[@tomasplunksnis1087]

VLC Media Player can read both CD, DVD and even BluRay discs, but you’ll need to have VLC version 2.0 or higher to read BluRay discs, but good thing VLC version 2.0 and higher is completely free.

[@itfreetraining]

VLC is the best software out there nowadays. Windows Media Player use the player DVDs, however it no longer does as Microsoft does not want to pay the licensing fees.