Optical Media
The various flavors of recordable CDs and DVDs are collectively known as optical media, because they rely on lasers to read and write data to them. Most of the Macs made in the past several years include a SuperDrive, which can write to and read from DVD media (up to 8.5 GB) and CD media (up to 800 MB); some have Combo drives that can read from DVDs and write to CDs.
Meanwhile, new standards continue to emerge. Most notably, several third-party vendors are now selling Mac-compatible Blu-ray Disc optical drives with up to 50 GB capacity; higher-capacity Blu-ray media and drives are under development. At the moment, however, the cost of Blu-ray drives for Macs is quite high—and out of proportion to their increased capacity.
Historically, ...
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