CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [205]
Memory Stick
Sony always likes to use proprietary formats, and their Memory Stick flash memory is no exception. If you own something from Sony and it uses flash memory, you’ll need a Memory Stick (Figure 13-16). There are several Memory Stick formats, including Standard, Pro, Duo, Pro Duo, and Micro.
Figure 13-16 Memory Stick
xD Picture Card
The proprietary Extreme Digital (xD) Picture Cards (Figure 13-17) are about half the size of an SD card. They’re almost exclusively used in Olympus and Fujifilm digital cameras, although Olympus (the developer of the xD technology) produces a USB housing so you can use an xD Picture Card like any other USB flash memory drive. The xD Picture Cards come in three flavors: original, Standard (Type M), and Hi-Speed (Type H). The Standard cards are slower than the original cards, but offer greater storage capacity. The Hi-Speed cards are two to three times faster than the others and enable you to capture full-motion video—assuming the camera has that capability, naturally!
Figure 13-17 xD card
Card Readers
Whatever type of flash memory you use, your PC must have a card reader to access the data on the card directly. A number of inexpensive USB card readers are available today (Figure 13-18), and some PCs, especially those tuned to home theater use, often come with built-in readers—handy to have when someone pulls out an SD card and says “Let’s look at the pictures I just took!” Of course, if the person just happened to bring her camera and the usually proprietary USB cable along, you could connect the camera to the PC and pull pictures in that way. Just make sure you have spare batteries, too! Wouldn’t a card reader be a more elegant solution?
Figure 13-18 USB card reader
Whichever type of flash memory you have, understand that it acts exactly like a hard drive. If you wish, you can format a memory card as well as copy, paste, and rename files.
Optical Drives
CD-, DVD-, and Blu-ray Disc–media discs and drives come in a variety of flavors and formats, enabling you to back up data, record music, master home videos, and much, much more. Optical disc is the generic term for all those different types of shiny, 12-centimeter-wide discs that, if you’re a slob like me, collect around your computer like pizza boxes. The drives that support them are called optical drives. This section examines optical discs, finishing with the details about installing optical drives.
CD stands for compact disc, a medium that was originally designed more than 20 years ago as a replacement for vinyl records. The CD now reigns as the primary method of long-term storage for sound and data. The digital versatile disc (DVD) first eliminated VHS cassette tapes from the commercial home movie market, and has also grown into a contender for backups and high-capacity storage. Blu-ray Disc (BD) eliminated the High-Definition DVD (HD DVD) format and may very well supersede DVD in the future as the high-definition video and data storage war wages on.
Going beyond those big three household names, the term optical disc refers to technologies such as CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD+RW, HD DVD, BD-R, BD-RE, and so on. Each of these technologies will be discussed in detail in this chapter—for now, understand that although optical disc describes a variety of exciting formats, they all basically boil down to the same physical object: that little shiny disc.
CD-Media
The best way to understand the world of optical discs is to sort out the many types of technologies available, starting with the first: the compact disc. All you’re about to read is relevant and fair game for the CompTIA A+ certification exams. Begin by looking at how CDs work.
How CDs Work
CDs—the discs that you buy in music stores or may find in software boxes—store data via microscopic pits. CD producers use a power laser to burn these pits into a glass master CD. Once the CD producer