CD/DVD

CD drives use compact disks, similar to the ones that hold music, to store information. A few years ago, CD drives were only available as ROM drives or Read Only Memory drives. These drives could only read information from a CD but not write to them. Recently, however, writeable CD drives have become less expensive and readily available to the average computer user. These drives allow one to write to a CD, thus allowing one to back-up and store vast quantities of information to a single disk. CD-ROMs are currently the most popular way that computer companies distribute applications and games, and are ideal for multimedia information like videos, music and large graphics files.