Patent 7231646 was granted and assigned to Sony on June, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A disc drive unit capable of simply performing an opening and closing driving of shutters by rotation of an inner rotor of a disc cartridge using the inner rotor is provided. A disc drive unit is constituted so as to open and close shutters (9, 10) by rotationally driving a partial gear (27) of the inner rotor (4) by a rack portion (74) of a rack member (71) slidably driving it relative to a disc cartridge (1).