The most important allotment of an optical disc drive is an optical path, placed in a pickup head (PUH), as usual consisting of semiconductor laser, a lense for guiding the laser Cassette to CD beam, and photodiodes detecting the fluorescent reflection from disc's surface.

Because conforming a constant transfer relation for the whole disc is not so important in most contemporary CD uses, to keep the rotational speed of the disc safely low while maximizing data rate, a pure CLV approach needed to be abandoned. Some drives endeavor in partial CLV (PCLV) scheme, by switching from CLV to CAV only when a rotational limit is reached.