CD Drive: This optical drive was used in the early days, and can still be found on some old laptops. It can read a CD ROM, and that's it. It began at speeds of 1x, and eventually worked its way past 52x. There were many different iterations of this device, the earliest being a cartridge that you would slide into your CD ROM bay containing the CD that you wanted run or listen to.

DVD Drive: This rapidly became a replacement for the standard CD ROM drive. Though there were many who believed that it could only read DVD's, it could in fact read both CD's and DVD's, effectively making the CD Drive obsolete. Newer DVD drives support burning of DVD-R and DVD+R discs, allowing for greater storage. The discs also come in Single-Layer and Dual-Layer versions, allowing for twice the storage, but at a premium price.

Blu-Ray drive: Blu-Ray is the next generation of optical media, set to replace the DVD as the standard for movie storage. These drives are becoming more common in higher end multimedia laptop machines.

Blu-Ray still has yet to establish itself as a storage platform, and as hard drive storage and flash drives become more affordable, many question whether optical drives will be necessary in the near future.DVD-RW or DVD-ROM/CD-RW:

Upgrades to the low-end DVD-ROM drive can include DVD-RW drives, CD-RW drives, or combination drives that will write to CD media but will read from DVDs and CDs. A DVD drive allows you to play DVD movies on your laptops and read big 4.7 GB DVD-ROMs, and a CD-RW drive allows you to write to CD-R and CD-RW discs, storing up to 640 MB of information on them. This is a handy method of backing up data while you are on the road, burning movies or audio CDs, or whatever you like.

Optical recorder drives are often marked with three different speed ratings. In these cases, the first speed is for write-once (R) operations, second for re-write (RW or RE) operations, and one for read-only (ROM) operations. For example a 12x/10x/32x CD drive is capable of writing to CD-R discs at 12x speed (1.76 MB/s), write to CD-RW discs at 10x speed (1.46 MB/s), and read from any CD discs at 32x speed (4.69 MB/s).

We offer the following internal laptop DVD and CD RW drives: DELL 24xCDRW 8xDVD Drive, Dell CD RW DVD ROM Drive Module, Replacement 24xCDRW 8xDVD Drive for Dell Inspiron 5000 5000e, 24xCD RW 8xDVD Combo for IBM 600 Series, 24xCD RW 8xDVD Combo for SONY VIAO, CD RW DVD Combo for Toshiba Satellite, etc.