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.