Driver for computer peripherals is truly like a piece of software that ‘drive’ the hardware to work and behave like we want them to be. Some of the common hardware include but not limited to printers, display cards, modems, sound cards and chipset controllers.
Normally we know driver as a piece of software that we download and install to our OS (Windows). However, there is another type of driver that we called firmware. Firmware insense is similar like driver but instead of installing to Windows, we often ‘flash’ firmware into the hardware itself, in Flash ROM(Flash read only memory) where the new firmware will take effect and run whenever the hardware started.
Usually we flash firmware for external hardware such as printer and scanner, but with current advancement in hardware technology and change of style for multi functional hardware, we always see firmware update for optical drives, hard drives and modem. Often firmware update will increase stability, allow more functionality and/or provide some sort of bug fixes for the hardware.