Optical drives are still practical for many users, whether to play old CDs and DVDs, install software, or create backups—especially with modern laptops, which are usually supplied without a drive.

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Most modern laptops lack an optical drive, yet CDs and DVDs are still used in many households, whether for playing old movies, installing older software, or even for making physical backups. An ...

Addonics Technologies on Wednesday announced a new portable CD burner and DVD drive. The Mobile DVD/CDRW connects to a PC or laptop via FireWire, PC card or USB 2.0 ports. It can write CD-R discs at ...

Does your laptop even have a DVD drive anymore? Mine sure doesn’t. Neither did the one I owned before. So, what can you do ...

How can I tell if a drive can be used to boot from? For ages I couldn't work out why my P133 machine wouldn't boot of CDs even when the option was checked in the BIOS. Then I realised it was the drive ...

Do combo movie-watching and music-recording drives have the write stuff? Apparently PC manufacturers think so. After a slow start, combination CD-rewritable and DVD drives are showing up in computers ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support all the DVD and CD formats. The speeds of the drives are rated by their DVD-ROM and CD-ROM transfer rates. The original DVD drive (1x) ...

Apple was one of the first manufacturers to exclude DVD players from its laptops, and the same quickly became true for iMacs as well. This meant that if you wanted to rip CDs for your iTunes library, ...

The PS5 refuses to play standard CDs by design. But with a unique optical drive and a clever trick, a YouTuber managed to make the console recognise data discs as USB storage, unlocking access to ...