Enter the external CD/DVD drive, which allows you to read and write data to CDs and DVDs to your heart's content. Best of all, it costs little more than the price of a DVD. My favorite external CD ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

An optical disc (CD, DVD) or USB drive that contains a bootable program that takes control of the computer ... valuable data files to be copied to an external drive. See file system.