One of the most interesting parts of the recent Apple Mac Mini and MacBook Air refresh is that Apple is moving away from optical drives. Apple isn't the only company to do so, raising the question "Is ...

If you depend on Apple MacBook for business computing tasks while you're on the road, you probably use the optical drive to perform necessary functions such as burning data backups to disc or for ...

So I just hooked up my optical drive for the first time since moving to Windows 10. It's probably been about 18 months since I last used it, and I purchased it back in 2009. I ripped a new music CD I ...

MiniDiscs were small, cartridge-based magneto-optical discs, primarily made for audio. Sony made these smaller discs in the ...

Few notebooks have CD or DVD drives today, thanks largely to the rise of web-based content and the cloud. Jennifer Zaino is a New York-based freelance writer specializing in business and technology ...

Optical drives, that can read and write CDs, DVDs, and sometimes Blu-ray discs, have been an important part of the PC universe for a long time. But there’s less and less need for them. I haven’t ...

Classic disc-based consoles are getting long in the tooth. As their optical drives burn out, they’re rendered unplayable, which is a shame -- these systems were the peak of gaming in the eyes of many.

Not entirely certain this is the appropriate forum, but I'm looking for a good/reasonable quality enclosure to repurpose one of the optical drives (CD/DVD RW) I saved from previous laptops. A quick ...

Sometimes you may need to reinstall OS X on a computer, but the drive is broken, resulting in an obvious problem with reading the installation DVD. Here are some methods to install OS X around a ...

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I want the https://www.pcworld.com/products/storage/optical_drives.html to die. I don’t just mean on laptops, either ...

One truism about computer hardware is that, once purchased, it immediately starts falling behind the leading edge of the technology curve. Consider the Dual-2.0GHz Power Mac G5 I purchased in ...

I haven't purchased an optical disc drive (ODD) for my PC since...actually, I don't even recall the last time I bought one. It's even been a minute since I owned a PC with a 5.25-inch drive bay to ...