A power control apparatus and method for an optical drive is disclosed. The power control apparatus estimates the temperature rising effect of a laser diode and performs a partial open-loop power control, achieving accurate write power control. Therefore, regarding to a high-speed, high-density optical disk recording medium combined with multi-pulse write waveforms, the invention can also achieve accurate write power control even though the response speed of a front photodiode is much slower than the modulation speed of recording pulses of the laser diode.