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.

Editors' note: This post was originally published on May 10, 2016 and is periodically updated. The cloud is great. But if you need a serious amount of storage, online backup is never quite enough.

It is almost mind-boggling how much data can be stored on a portable drive or USB thumb drive. As convenient as it is it to be able to carry 1TB of data in your pocket, though, portable drives are ...