The CD-ROM drive
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The Compact Disc (CD) drive is one of the most widespread storage
devices in modern PCs. It allows easy transport of lots of data (up to
700 MB per CD), and it ended the stoneage times of stiffy disk storage.
CD drives are optical storage media in the sense that they use laser
technology to read. Their advantage over magnetical storage is the
media's resistance to electricity, water and dust.
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A simple CD drive is cheap and much faster than floppies or tape drives,
and it is very reliable as long as there are no scratches on the CD,
but it is a read-only device: you can neither delete something
nor save on it.
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an Aopen CD drive
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CD drives differ in the speed they read. This is measured as multiples
of 150KB/second, the speed of audio CDs in an audio CD player. So the
slowest CD drive is single speed (150 KB/second), and modern CD drives
work at 40-speed (6000 KB/second) or even 50-speed (7500 KB/second).
Every of these drives can play audio CDs as well, and it can of course
play them at single speed ;-)
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