What is a CD Drive?

While Compact Disc drives, or CD drives, are not very popular today, the technology was key to the development of computing and many other use cases for the last few decades. But how exactly does a CD drive work and why is the tech on its way out? These are some of the questions we’ll be finding the answers to today.

What is a CD?

Before we jump to CD drives, let’s get a basic understanding of compact discs themselves. The compact disc is a portable storage medium that is capable of recording, storing and reproducing media and files on demand. A CD usually measures 4.7-inches and weighs between 15 and 20 grams, although there are smaller variants in use. These CDs typically can carry 700MB of data.

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What is a CD drive?

To be able to write data on or read data from a CD, you need a component called a CD drive. CD drives are often seen as a part of desktops or laptops, but can also be seen in some cars. There are also external CD drives which can be attached to computers that do not natively possess the component.

CD drives work by placing the CDs in a pre-specified stencil and focussing a 780-nanometer laser onto the disc. This laser beam hits one particular track (groove) of the disc, and as the disc rotates, the CD drive is able to read more of it. The differences in the way the laser beam is reflected off the CD’s surface help the CD drive understand the data on it.

Why are CDs not so popular anymore?

CDs have commercially been popular since 1982, and have been actively in use ever since. However, their usage has gone down quite a bit over the last decade. This is due to both advancements in other forms of portable storage media, as well as the cons of using CDs, which didn’t really have a solution.

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Compared to something like flash drives or external SSD/HDD storage units, CDs are fragile and can easily be irreversibly damaged or destroyed. They also carry very less data per disc compared to flash drives, and can only be written on or burned a limited number of times, after which the disc had to simply be discarded.

For these reasons, CDs were eventually taken over by DVDs which possess much more storage (4.7GB to be precise) and Blu-rays (which came with 25GB data support), but the problems of the disc form factor remain. This is why many mainstream storage use cases have now moved on to memory cards, flash drives, external HDD/SSDs or other wireless forms of data storage and transfer, like cloud storage.