How Storage Media Comes In Handy

CD media storage, it its most limited, fundamental sense, is any medium by which data or information may be stored for later accessibility. This may range anywhere from the printed page, to computers, to the human brain. For thousands of years, storage media blank was - while mixed - limited by techniques that involved physically marking an object (the storage medium itself) with information that could later be read by the human eye and prepared from the brain.

These involved everything from scriptures hand written with paper and ink, to hieroglyphics carved into stone. Nevertheless, in the last several decades, advances in technology have exposed a whole new avenue that has revolutionized the way humans record and maintain information: electronic storage media.

Everybody is familiar with electronic storage media in the kinds of optical discs, including Video games, Dvd disks and Blu-ray cds, all of these can store music, video, or practically any sort of data in any format that can be accessed using a computer. Optical storage media works by recording data onto the outer lining of a disc, which stores information by encoding it in a binary data format in the form of "lands" as well as "pits" - comparable to the crests and troughs of an ocean wave, respectively.

These almost microscopic grooves symbolize data as binary code where lands equal a 1 and pits a 0, which is then read by reflecting a laserlight off the surface of the disc. The reflection of the laser is distorted by the layout of lands along with pits - 1s and 0s - and these distortions are then read and translated as unique data. As the discs on their own can be a relatively fragile storage media, the amount of data they can hold is tremendous. A regular CD can hold about 700mb of data, which if entirely dedicated to text data can store the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of written pages.

While written storage media containing this amount of text data might weigh several pounds and be so physically cumbersome as to make carrying the data somewhat difficult, a CD weighing only a few grams can easily contain plenty of books worth of text. What's more is that while on paper, more data requires more storage space, consequently increasing the physical weight and size of the medium, optical data weighs virtually nothing so that a CD crammed with data weighs only a CD with nothing on it.

And while making duplicate copies of this much written data would likely take loads of man hours to manually duplicate with a pen and paper, a duplicate CD may be copied and recorded within a matter of minutes. But that, while paper storage media may be heavy and cumbersome, it requires nothing more to interpret than the human eye. Optical storage media, in contrast, demands other equipment to interpret the data for the user, which alone can be physically cumbersome as well as vulnerable to damage.


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Article by Paul Wise. When it comes to Storage media, Paul suggests Tapes.com for great advice on blank storage media for you