At OpticalDrives.net you will learn about the optical drives and their usage with more information. In computing, sound reproduction, and video, an optical disc is a flat, circular, usually polycarbonate disc where data is stored in the form of pits (or bumps) within a flat surface, usually along a single spiral groove that covers the entire recorded surface of the disc. While Optical Discs are significantly more durable than earlier audio/visual and data formats, they are susceptible to damage from daily usage and environmental factors. An acronym for Optical Disc Drives is ODD.

A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. Both 130 mm and 90 mm form factors exist. Although optical, they appear as hard drives to the operating system and do not require a special filesystem (they can be formatted as FAT, HPFS, NTFS, etc.). Initially the drives were 130 mm and had the size of full-height 130 mm hard-drives.

Progress in magneto-optical technology received a boost in the spring of 1997 with the launch of Plasmon�s DW260 drive. This used Light Intensity Modulated Direct OverWrite technology to achieve an increased level of performance over previous magneto-optical drives. There are many such optical drives you will learn on our other pages at OpticalDrives.net.