A CD or DVD burner is a computer peripheral that writes data to optical discs. The technology has been around for over 20 years, and the quality of burners has only gotten better over time. These days, there are a number of different types of optical drives, including CD burners, DVD burners, Blu-ray burners, and combo drives.

There are a number of reasons why you might want to consider purchasing an external CD or DVD burner. Perhaps you need to burn a disc for a presentation and don’t have a built-in burner. Or maybe you have a lot of data …