It has a capacity of 650 MB on one side, and the size of the disc is 12cm in diameter (5 inches) similar to a general CD or DVD, and it is used in a state where it is housed in a square cartridge. The phase change recording technology using red laser light is adopted, and about 500,000 times of rewriting is possible.
The built-in PD drive and the external type are sold, respectively, and both of them can read the CD-ROM. Both drive and media, most of which are manufactured by Matsushita Electric Appliances only, the company also released a notebook PC with a 650 MB auxiliary storage device and a 4× CD-ROM drive, a PRONOTE PD (August 1996).
CD-RW can be cited as a re-writable medium at the same time, but it is characterized by being able to write and delete on a file basis, which is close to the feeling of handling CD-RW and floppy disk using packet write system. Also, due to the characteristics contained in the cartridge, it does not touch the recording surface directly, so it is resistant to dust and scratches and is relatively reliable. CD-R and CD-RW were not so popular at the time, and there were instabilities such as many write failures. Although the writing speed of PD is not fast, it is about to be faster than writing to floppy, but at the time of sale, it was not a speed that made it so difficult.
Meanwhile, MO, ZIP drive, SyQuest, etc. existed as re-writable media close to the feeling of handling floppy disks, but the advantage that the PD drive can be read by the CD-ROM was merit compared with those. At that time the CD-ROM drive was becoming an essential peripheral device, but it was not necessarily built in every PC yet, desktop machines that were mainstream at that time had many models with only one drive bay. In such an environment, a PD capable of serving as both a CD-ROM drive and a large capacity (then) auxiliary storage device was advantageous both in terms of cost and installation.
DVD-RAM appeared as a successor technology in April 1997, DVD-RAM adopts a cartridge similar to PD, and the 2.6 GB version 1.0 standard, which has just one side capacity equal to 4 times the PD, DVD - It was possible to read and write PD in the RAM drive. However, in the summer of 2000, compatibility with PD was not taken into consideration when creating DVD-RAM version 2.0, which has the same with 4.7 GB standard capacity as other DVDs. At this point PD drives and media effectively disappeared from the market.
Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
CD-R is a digital optical disc storage format. A CD-R disc is a compact disc that can be written once and read arbitrarily many times.
Universal Disk Format (UDF) is an open, vendor-neutral file system for computer data storage for a broad range of media. In practice, it has been most widely used for DVDs and newer optical disc formats, supplanting ISO 9660. Due to its design, it is very well suited to incremental updates on both write-once and re-writable optical media. UDF was developed and maintained by the Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA).
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB.
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
SuperDrive is the product name for a floppy disk drive and later an optical disc drive made and marketed by Apple Inc. The name was initially used for what Apple called their high-density floppy disk drive, and later for the internal CD and DVD drive integrated with Apple computers. Though Apple no longer manufactures computers that feature built-in SuperDrives, the name is still used when referring to Apple's external CD and DVD drive accessory (pictured).
A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. 130 mm (5.25 in) and 90 mm (3.5 in) discs were the most common sizes. In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the compact disc, Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable magneto-optical compact discs during the 73rd AES Convention in Eindhoven. The technology was introduced commercially in 1985. Although optical, they normally appear as hard disk drives to an operating system and can be formatted with any file system. Magneto-optical drives were common in some countries, such as Japan, but have fallen into disuse.
A USB flash drive is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and usually weighs less than 30 g (1 oz). Since first offered for sale in late 2000, the storage capacities of USB drives range from 8 to 256 gigabytes (GB), 512 GB and 1 terabyte (TB). As of 2023, 2 TB flash drives were the largest currently in production. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to physically last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances.
DVD-RAM is a DVD-based disc specification presented in 1996 by the DVD Forum, which specifies rewritable DVD-RAM media and the appropriate DVD writers. DVD-RAM media have been used in computers as well as camcorders and personal video recorders since 1998.
The Jaz drive is a removable hard disk storage system sold by the Iomega company from 1995 to 2002.
A DVD recorder is an optical disc recorder that uses optical disc recording technologies to digitally record analog or digital signals onto blank writable DVD media. Such devices are available as either installable drives for computers or as standalone components for use in television studios or home theater systems.
The Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) is an optical disc technology that was expected to store up to several terabytes of data on an optical disc 10 cm or 12 cm in diameter. Its development commenced in April 2004, but it never arrived due to lack of funding. The company responsible for HVD went bankrupt in 2010.
The double-density compact disc (DDCD) is an optical disc technology developed by Sony and Philips using the same 780 nm laser wavelength as a compact disc. The format was announced in July 2000 and is defined by the Purple Book standard document. Unlike the compact-disc technology it is based on, DDCD was designed exclusively for data, with no audio capabilities.
Optical storage refers to a class of data storage systems that use light to read or write data to an underlying optical media. Although a number of optical formats have been used over time, the most common examples are optical disks like the compact disc (CD) and DVD. Reading and writing methods have also varied over time, but most modern systems as of 2023 use lasers as the light source and use it both for reading and writing to the discs. Britannica notes that it "uses low-power laser beams to record and retrieve digital (binary) data."
In computing, external storage refers to non-volatile (secondary) data storage outside a computer's own internal hardware, and thus can be readily disconnected and accessed elsewhere. Such storage devices may refer to removable media, compact flash drives, portable storage devices, or network-attached storage. Web-based cloud storage is the latest technology for external storage.
DVD recordable and DVD rewritable are optical disc recording technologies. Both terms describe DVD optical discs that can be written to by a DVD recorder, whereas only 'rewritable' discs are able to erase and rewrite data. Data is written ('burned') to the disc by a laser, rather than the data being 'pressed' onto the disc during manufacture, like a DVD-ROM. Pressing is used in mass production, primarily for the distribution of home video.
Optical disc authoring requires a number of different optical disc recorder technologies working in tandem, from the optical disc media to the firmware to the control electronics of the optical disc drive.
Ultra Density Optical (UDO) is an optical disc format designed for high-density storage of high-definition video and data. The format was introduced by Sony to replace the Magneto-optical disc format.
As of 2021, multiple consumer-oriented, optical-disk media formats are or were available:
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
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