Why USB DVD Drives Have Replaced USB CD Drives
In this age of ever advancing computer technology, educated consumers are demanding more from manufacturers. The need to get smaller and faster has caused the creation of new devices and improvement of older ones. A good case in point is the USB CD storage drive. At one time it was state of the art, but now with recent advancements, is considered outmoded.
The new mode of choice is the USB DVD drive which uses almost the same type of components to function. This second generation device is read by a low power laser to read binary data that has been encoded unto a plastic disk in the form of tiny pits.
It has become extremely popular due to the ability to store almost any kind of data including movies, images, graphics and even text. Although each type of drive has a single-sided format, the DVD can also occur in a double sided layer, increasing the storage capacity by almost 30 times that of a standard USB CD drive. Since they each take up the same amount of physical space, this becomes an easy choice for the consumer.
Another factor to consider is the way in which multi-media systems are being manufactured. While the CD can be read by most DVD players, the opposite is not the case. Thus new technology is backward compatible, making it easy to use and extremely accessible.
With the advent of plug and play by most computer manufacturers, the usb or universal serial bus has almost completely replace the older serial or parallel cables that heretofore had been the industry standard. The usb industry itself has undergone some changes, with the type 2 replacing the outmoded type 1. The data transfer rate jumped at an astonishing rate, going from 12 Mbits per second to 480 Mbits per second.
By being able to move information at this rate, and with access times even greater than before, it is easy to see why there is no issue with the larger storage capacity of the DVD disk. Speed is the key element driving all of these changes and in the business world, time is money.
Thus it is easy to see that with all of the advantages offered by the DVD model, it has become the defacto standard of the computer industry and the favorite of buyers everywhere. In today’s discriminating marketplace, a product without the right features has little chance to survive.
