What Is an Optical Device on a Dell Laptop?
An optical device is one that produces or controls light. In computers, optical drives often refer to such devices as CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and HD-DVD readers and writers. Dell laptops use a variety of internal optical drives made by Sony and NEC. Optical drives are perfect because of their compact size and ability to store data on a small compact disc.
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Types of Optical Drives
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You have many options when it comes to choosing an optical drive for your Dell laptop. Currently you can buy slot-loading or traditional drives that require a button to be pushed to eject the media. You can choose from CD/DVD combo drives that allow you to read and write both CDs and DVDs. While not a default configuration, newer computers offer Blu-ray reading and writing technology.
Which Optical Drive Is Right for Me?
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Choosing the right optical drive depends on the type of media you wish to read and write. If you have a computer that is hooked up with a high definition video card and monitor, you may want to invest in a Blu-ray drive to watch high-quality DVD video. A typical CD can hold up to 750 MB, a single-layer DVD can hold up to 4.7 GB, and a dual-layer DVD can hold up to 8.5 GB.
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Benefits
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Optical drives have many benefits over other means of data transfer. Since optical drives rely on light, it offers the fastest read and write speeds available. The optical drive replaced the archaic floppy disk, and allows for data to be written at high speeds.
History
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Compact discs also known as CD came out in 1980 and were first mass produced by Philips. The disks first gained popularity by playing music, however; they quickly became a replacement for the outdated floppy disk. DVDs first came out in 1992 and are considered to be high-density CDs.
Format War
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In early 2005 there was a format war emerging against Blu-ray and HD-DVD media. Both formats were high-definition DVDs, and could hold and record high definition video. Toshiba was the first manufacturer to produce an HD-DVD player. The format war came to an end on May 2008, when Blu-ray became the official format for high definition video.
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References
- Photo Credit Justin Zeigler
