How Does an External DVD Burner Work?
Differences from an Internal Burner The major difference between an internal DVD burner and an external DVD burner is that the internal one must be plugged in and inserted into the tower of your computer, while you can set an external DVD burner on a shelf somewhere or wherever you happen to want it. An external DVD burner connects to your computer via either a USB or Firewire cable. These cables are used to transmit data from your hard drive to the computer. Spinning The external DVD burner will use a blank DVD the same way an internal one would. Once the disk is in the tray and the drive is closed, the disk begins to spin, because the laser that is used by the drive to write to and read from media can only access all information if the disc is spinning. Blank Media On a blank DVD with a single layer, a user can fit 4.8 gigabytes of information. With a blank dual layer DVD, a user can fit over 9 gigabytes of information on one disk. A special drive will be required to write to dual la
