Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

Modern CD-ROM drives also play audio CDs. See CD-ROM and CD-ROM drives. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction requires permission.

A mildly annoying trend over recent years has been for USB hardware devices to expose a CD-ROM drive containing their drivers for Windows users. Of course there’s no real CD in there ...

As you might be aware, modern Apple and Windows laptops don’t come with DVD/CD drives. This is where devices like Apple SuperDrive come in to help you play, read and write these optical drives ...

It’s something [Daniel1111] has done with his Arduino CD player, which uses the little microcontroller board to control a CD-ROM drive via its IDE bus.