Digital Video Disk drive
- DVD also known as the Digital Versatile Disk drive, installs in one of the external 5 1/4 inch drive bays in the PC. It is secured by machine screws. Some manufacturers offer special rail-like systems that mount on the DVD. These allow the drive to be removed from the PC without having to remove screws.
- It is designed to optically access data stored on a DVD. A laser moves back and forth near the disk surface and accesses data at a very fast rate.
- A 4-pin cable from the power supply plugs into the CDD and provides power to it.
- Data between the DVD drive and the motherboard is carried on a 40-pin IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) cable.
- There are two types of DVD drives that typically go into PCs.
- DVD-ROM (Read Only Memory) can read DVDs and CDs and costs about $75.
- DVD-RAM (Random Access Memory) units can read and write DVDs. They can also read CDs and cost about $500.
- A standard DVD stores up to 4.7 Gbytes on one side of the disk. Digitally formatted movies can be stored on a standard DVD in MPEG-2 format.