Drives (visual)

On the front of the computer (though sometimes the side if its and all-in-one computer) there are what is known as drives. I will now go through common drives found on computers.

CD and DVD drives are now most commonly what you will see on the front of a computer. CD drives and DVD drives both look very similar but if you look at the labeling on the front it will tell you what type of drive it is. They are either tray or slot loading (the drives shown here are for laptops). The media used in these drives is either CD's or DVD's (including -r, +r, -rw, and +rw). CD's typically hold 700MB and DVD's hold 4.7GB single layer and 8.5GB duel layer.

Floppy drives are also somewhat common on computers. Though they are so outdated and the disks have such a small capacity that most people today don't use them (some people never knew they existed). Floppy disks hold only 1.4MB of data.

Zip drives are about as common as floppy drives, but probably a little more common. They are very often found as external drives, but can be internal. The disks hold much more data then floppies but are still not quite as widespread as CD's. Zip disks come in 3 capacities: 100MB, 250MB, and 750MB.

USB Flash drives are not a permanent attachment on the front of a computer but are a drive (and very popular) and so are worth mentioning. These drives can be also know as thumb drives, jump drives, or pen drives and come in a large variety of colors and sizes. The capacity of these drives range from 16MB-16GB+. The most common capacities so far are 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB. They are extremely portable and very convenient for fast file transfers without haveing to burn things to CD or DVD.