Compact Disc

Abbreviated as CD, a compact disc is a flat round storage medium that is read by a laser in a CD-ROM drive that was first created by A Philips on August 17, 1982. The standard CD is capable of holding 72 minutes of music or 650 MB of data. 80 minute CDs are also commonly used to store data and are capable of containing 700 MB of data.

• See our cleaning page for additional information and help with cleaning a compact disc as well as other computer hardware.

Also see: Audio CD, CD definitions, CD-R, CD-ROM, Optical disc