CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read Only Memory) A compact disc format used to hold text, graphics and hi-fi stereo sound. It's like an audio CD with spiral, grooved tracks, but uses a different format for recording data. The audio CD player cannot play CD-ROMs, but CD-ROM players can play audio discs. CD-ROMs hold 650MB of data, which is equivalent to about 250,000 pages of text, or 20,000 medium-resolution images. Sometimes 680MB is used as the capacity, depending on …showed first 75 words of 3398 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3398 total…seek time performance than hard disks do. They use a much less efficient head actuator mechanism that causes them to take much more time to position to different tracks on the surface of the disk. This is probably because of the legacy of CD-ROM technology, which started out with audio CDs. When listening to an audio disk the only time a random seek is done is when changing music tracks, which is done very rarely.