Optical Storage Mediums :: essays research papers

ocular Storage MediumsThe most common way of storing data in a computer is magnetised. We endure hard endeavours and floppy plows (soon making way to the CD-ROM), two of which butt joint store somewhat amount of data. In a magnetic disk drive, a read/write head (usually a coil ofwire) passes everyplace a spinning disk, generating an electrical current, whichdefines a bit as both a 1 or a 0. There are limitations to this though, andthat is that we can only make the head so small, and the tracks and sectors so fast, before the drive starts to suffer from interference from nearby tracksand sectors. What other option do we sacrifice to store massive amount of data? Wecan use barge.      elucidation has its advantages. It is of a short wavelength, so wecan place tracks very close together, and the size of the track we use isdependent only on unrivalled(a) thing - the color of the light we use. An optical ordinarytypically involves some sort of optical m aser, for laser light does not diverge, so wecan pinch it to a specific place on the disk. By moving the laser a littlebit, we can change tracks on a disk, and this straw man is very small, usuallyless than a hairs width. This allows single to store an immense amount of data onone disk. The light does not touch the disk surface, thereby not creatingfriction, which leads to wear, so the vivification of an average optical disk is furthermostlonger than that of a magnetic medium. Also, it is impossible to crash anoptical disk (in the same wizard as crashing a hard drive), since there is aprotective layer cover charge the data areas, and that the head of the drive canbe quite far away from the disk surface (a few millimeters compared tomicrometers for a hard drive). If this medium is so superior, then why is itnot standard equipment? It is. Most of the saucily computers have a CD-ROM drivethat comes with it. Also, it is only recently that prices have come low enoughto actually m ake them affordable. However, as the acronym states, one cannotwrite to a CD-ROM disk (unless one gets a CD-Recordable disk and drive). Thereare products however, that allows one to store and retrieve data on a opticalmedium. Some of those products are shown in table 1. However, the constitute of thisis quite high, so it doesnt usually make much sense for consumer use yet,unless one loves to transfers 20 megabyte pictures between friends.