It consists of Silver, Indium, antimony, and tellurium. The laser beam changes the reflective properties of the coating allowing the beam to be seen with more or less intensity. There are two methods of recording, by using a special program that records the whole CD at once or by using special programs that allow you to use the Explorer Windows 95 program to drag and drop files and folders into the CD-ROM within Explorer. The drag and drop method requires you to pre-format the CD disk with a large drawback which is that the final formatted capacity looses about 150 megabytes giving you only about 490 MB of useful recordable space.
Drives can be either internal or external.
Internal drives connect to the motherboard using an IDE cable which is the same cable used by hard drives and CD-ROM drives. External drives can be connected to either the parallel port, the USB port or to the new Firewire connector. Firewire is a new technology which is not available on most computers. To use a Firewire drive, you will most likely have to buy and install a Firewire Card. The parallel port connector type drives will work with all PC computers provided you have the appropriate drives.