An optical disk drive (CD/DVD drive) is very useful, as most software is distributed by CDs or DVDs. Furthermore, a CD/DVD drive also enables a computer to play multimedia content from off-the-shelf CDs and DVDs. Most optical disk drives are read/write (R/W) drives. This means that these drives can “burn” (record) CDs and DVDs on blank media. Depending on several factors, a media that is burned by a computer may be playable using a dedicated DVD player or CD player.
The capacity of optical media increases rapidly, and optical disk drives have to follow the new standards. Nonetheless, the capacity of an optical disk does not catch up with the capacity of hard disk drives. As a result, optical disks are typically not very practical for backing up a hard disk drive. On the other hand, an optical media can be used to back up select user data.
In the past, a CD/DVD drive connects to a motherboard via IDE connectors. However, most newer CD/DVD drives connect by a serial ATA interface.