Mac OS X Lion: The Missing Manual

Disks Today

So what’s springing up to take their places? Let us count the disks.

Hard Drives

Thanks to the Mac’s Thunderbolt, FireWire, or USB jacks, it’s easier than ever to attach an external hard drive for extra storage.

CDs, DVDs

You wouldn’t get far in today’s computer world without a CD/DVD drive. Most commercial software still comes on a CD or DVD—not to mention the music CDs that the Mac can play so expertly.

CD-ROM stands for “compact disc, read-only memory”—in other words, you can’t freely add and delete files from one, as you can from a hard drive. But most Macs can also record onto blank CDs, of course, and blank DVDs, too, thanks to a built-in CD/DVD burner. A burner can record onto either of two kinds of blank discs:

• CD-R. You can fill this type of disc with your own files—once. (The R stands for recordable.) The disc can’t be erased. Once you’ve grasped that much, you’ll probably also understand the term DVD-R (and the nearly identical “plus” versions, CD+R and DVD+R).

  Note

  A Mac can accept either kind of blank disc: the -R type or the +R type. They’re technically different, but since your Mac can handle either type, just buy whichever is on sale.

• CD-RW. The initials stand for rewritable; using Disk Utility, you can erase one of these discs and rerecord it, over and over again. Of course, CD-RW and DVD-RW blank discs are somewhat more expensive than the one-shot kind.

The standard Mac CD/DVD drive can also play DVD movies that you’ve rented or bought, but you may also occasionally ...