What Are The Essential Characteristics Of A CD-ROM Drive?

The CD-ROM drive of a personal computer may have the following characteristics –

• Drive Specification – It primarily deals with the performance ability of a drive. It includes the following factors –

Data transfer rate – It indicates the amount of data to be read by the drive from the data CD and hence transfer it to the host computer as well.
Access time – It denotes the time interval among the command to read and the actual reading of the first chunk of information.

Buffer size – It specifies the size of the cache memory.

• Readable format – The data on the disc is organized maintaining certain standards so that it can be read.

• Connecting interface – This interface specifies the physical connection of CD-ROM drive to the PC's expansion bus. The most common interface is SCSI which stands for Small Computer System Interface. There are following interfaces –

SCSI standard interfaces
SCSI 2
ASPI and
Non-standard SCSI.