CD-ROM
Pronounced see-dee-rom. Short for Compact Disc-Read-Only Memory, a type of optical disk capable of storing large amounts of data — up to 1GB, although the most common size is 650MB (megabytes). A single CD-ROM has the storage capacity of 700 floppy disks, enough memory to store about 300,000 textpages.
CD-ROMs are stamped by the vendor, and once stamped, they cannot be erased and filled with new data. To read a CD, you need a CD-ROM player. All CD-ROMs conform to a standard size and format, so you can load any type of CD-ROM into any CD-ROM player. In addition, CD-ROM players are capable of playing audio CDs, which share the same technology.
CD-ROMs are particularly well-suited to information that requires large storage capacity. This includes large software applications that support color, graphics, sound, and especially video.
Read Also:
- CD-ROM/XA
Short for CD-ROM/eXtended Architecture, a specification developed by Sony, Phillips and Microsoft that enables many different types of data — audio, video, compressed video, and graphics — to be stored on a single CD-ROM.
- CD-ROM player
Also called a CD-ROM drive, a device that can read information from a CD-ROM. CD-ROM players can be either internal, in which case they fit in a bay, or external, in which case they generally connect to the computer’s SCSI interface or parallel port. Parallel CD-ROM players are easier to install, but they have several […]
- CD-RW
See CD-RW disk.
- CD-RW Disk
Short for CD-ReWritable disk, a type of CD disk that enables you to write onto it in multiple sessions. One of the problems with CD-R disks is that you can only write to them once. With CD-RW drives and disks, you can treat the optical disk just like a floppy or hard disk, writing data […]
- CD-R drive
Short for Compact Disk-Recordable drive, a type of disk drive that can create CD-ROMs and audio CDs. This allows users to “master” a CD-ROM or audio CD for publishing. Until recently, CD-R drives were quite expensive, but prices have dropped dramatically. A feature of many CD-R drives, called multisession recording, enables you to keep adding […]