Components of a Desktop Computer (Optical Disc Drive)

These are used to read optical media like DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. To read the data written on a DVD or a Blu-ray disc, a pickup head is present inside. It comprises of a lens which a helps a laser beam to throw light on the written data in a current sequence. The reflected light is captured by photodiodes. Thus, the data is analysed and processed to make it understandable to humans.

Desktops generally feature a tray-load type optical disk drives while the laptops feature a slot-load type optical disk drives. These optical disk drives are capable of reading and writing data to a supported media. External optical disk drives are also available which can connect to the USB port present on the computer.