yellowpax.blogg.se - Best optical drive for mac plays blu ray

How to read or write optical disks without an optical drive They've already been made obsolete by a host of competing technologies like flash drives, high-capacity HDDs, SSDs, and cloud storage. Rewritable Blu-ray formats: These exist but, since they arrived so recently (starting around 2003, with new versions arriving as recently as 2017), it isn't a popular consumer format.

Some common formats include: CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and others. A "RW" disc is rewritable, which indicates that you can write, erase, and rewrite data to it multiple times, like a regular hard or flash drive (though many RW discs have limitations on how many times they can be rewritten).

Recordable and rewritable discs: Many optical media formats have a suffix that includes an "R," which indicates that the disc can be written to a single time, so once the disc is filled with new data, it is permanent.

Commercial software, when it ships on disc, is commonly sold on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, while read-only Blu-ray is rarely used for anything except movie distribution (and even that is quickly being supplanted by streaming services).

Read-only formats: Some optical discs are read-only, which means they can't be used to store new data, and the "-ROM" suffix is used to indicate this format.

The good news is that, in general, most modern optical drives can read and write most common formats. Many different companies developed different versions of optical drives and optical media, often competitively, rarely ever collaborating.

That's a consequence of the decades-long development process that optical drives went through. The optical drive exists to accommodate media, and there's a bewildering array of optical media formats. The optical drives on older Mac laptops featured a simple slot instead of a pop-out tray.