Chapter 8

Floppy Drive and CD-ROM Drives

Here you will learn Floppy Disk, CD-Rom and CD Writers.

Floppy Disk Drives

A 3.5" square holding a flexible magnetic disc that holds information or data. You need a floppy drive to read the floppy. A floppy disk can hold only 1.44 megabytes, but it is portable and allows you to make copies of your files.

CD-ROM Drives

A CD-ROM drive used to be an 'optional extra' in computers - it is no longer so. Most software packages come in CD format, so you must have a CD-ROM drive to read them. Typically, CD-ROM drives today need to be at least 24X speed to keep up with the newer software applications out there.

A CD drive connects to the computer motherboard through two types of cables. The older and more common connection is through the IDE Ribbon cable. Recently SATA (Serial ATA) drives have been produced and will gradually become more common. The benefits of having SATA cables is that they are smaller and the transfer rate is higher.

Floppy drives were the main source of data transfer and files were small enough to fit on them. However, today even CD drives are getting out of date and are fast being replaced by the DVD ROM and DVD RW Drives.

CD Writers

CD writer is used to write CD. It can also used as a CD drive. CD can be able to write with different formats. By using CD writer we can able to write with different speeds. There are different types of writers are available in the market with different writing speeds.

On a CD drive there is usually some numbers with a x symbol after it. This stands for times, for example common speeds are 4x, 8x, 16x, 18x, 24x, 32x, 40x and 52x. CD RW drives have speeds like 24x-10x-40x or 52x-32x-52x.

When you are choosing one CD-RW you have to consider drive speed. For CD writers, you should generally look for a 40X record speed or faster. If you buy anything that is slower, it will definitely waste a lot of time when you're burning CDs.