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From ten feet away, optical drives of all flavors look absolutely identical. Figure 13-29 shows a CD-RW, DVD, and BD-R drive. Can you tell them apart just by a glance? In case you were wondering, the CD-RW is on the bottom, the DVD is next, and finally the BD-R is on the top. If you look closely at an optical drive, you will normally see its function either stamped on the front of the case or printed on a label somewhere less obvious (see Figure 13-30).

Connections

Most internal optical drives use PATA or SATA connections and support the ATAPI standard. (Other connections, such as SCSI and USB, are possible but less common.) External optical drives often use USB, FireWire, or eSATA connections. ATAPI treats an optical drive exactly as though it were an ATA drive. PATA optical drives have regular 40-pin IDE connectors and master/slave jumpers. SATA optical drives use standard SATA or eSATA cables. You install them the same way you would install any ATA hard drive. Figure 13-31 shows a typical DVD installation using PATA. The DVD is configured as slave with a master hard drive on a system’s primary IDE controller.

ATAPI drives require no CMOS changes as part of the installation process. When the industry first introduced ATAPI drives, techs familiar with hard-drive installations swamped the CD-ROM makers’ service departments asking how to set up the drives in CMOS. To reduce these calls, BIOS makers added a CD-ROM option in many CMOS setup utilities, just to give the techs something to do! You can find this option in many older CMOS setup utilities. This setting actually didn’t do anything at all; it just kept users from bothering the CD-ROM makers with silly support calls. Modern motherboards report the actual model numbers of optical drives, giving techs a degree of assurance that they configured and installed the drive correctly (Figure 13-32).

Figure 13-29 CD-RW, DVD, and BD-R drives

Figure 13-30 Label on optical drive indicating its type and speeds

Almost all new PCs have one, two, or three external expansion buses—USB, FireWire, or eSATA—and the makers of optical drives have quickly taken this fact to heart. Many manufacturers have released external versions of CD, DVD, and Blu-ray Disc drives, both readers and burners. Of the two most common expansion options, I prefer FireWire simply because it’s the standard for most digital video cameras, and its 400-Mbps sustained data transfer rate easily trumps the Hi-Speed USB 480-Mbps burst rate for transferring huge files.

Figure 13-31 Typical DVD installation

Figure 13-32 Autodetect settings for two optical drives

The only benefit to the USB versions is that USB is still more common than FireWire, particularly on portable computers. In fact, quite a few super-light laptops don’t have an optical drive built in; the only way to load an OS on them is through an external drive. If you can’t decide which expansion type to use, several manufacturers have taken pity on you.

You won’t find any CD or DVD drives with eSATA—they just can’t take advantage of the blazing speed offered by the best of the external ports. Blu-ray Disc drive manufacturers, on the other hand, have released several drives with both eSATA and Hi-Speed USB connections. If you have the choice, there is no choice. Choose eSATA every time.

Device Manager

When you install a new optical drive, such as a DVD drive, into an existing system, the first question to ask is “Does Windows recognize my DVD drive?” You can determine this by opening the My Computer icon and verifying that a DVD drive is present (see Figure 13-33). When you want to know more, go to Device Manager.

The Device Manager contains most of the information about the DVD drive. The General tab tells you about the current status of the DVD drive, basically saying whether the device is working properly or not—rather less useful than actually trying the device. Other tabs, such as the Driver tab, provide other pertinent information about the drive.

Figure 13-33 DVD drive letter in My Computer

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