What is Optical drive?

DVD writers are standard gear on today's computers. A DVD burner provides removable storage for home-video footage or digital photos. With the HD disc format wars over, Blu-ray disc (BD) drives are the standard to look for. BD is capable of playing the growing list of Blu-ray movies and can store 50GB, almost six times the capacity of a double-layer DVD. On some systems, you might find Blu-Ray/HD DVD combo drives, which can also play whatever HD DVD movies are still out there. There are also three older competing, incompatible DVD formats-DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM. Some drives can write in more than one format, but all can create a disc that will play on stand-alone DVD players.