The CD-R drive or compact disk-recordable is a read/write variety of the CD-ROM drive. This means it can read or "play" the disk, but can also "record" or write to the disk. This drive is not as common as its CD-ROM drive relative, and is much more expensive.

The CD-R drive is able to write data to a special CD-R disk. Most drives can write one time to this disk, The biggest drawback is that CD-R disk is not erasable. Once the data is written to the disk it can not be erased. This data is permanently stored on the CD-R disk.

Multimedia developers use the CD-R drive to store their multimedia presentations. Other organizations that need large permanent storage also use this technology.