CD media storage, it its most limited, fundamental sense, is any medium by which data or information can be stored for subsequent access. This could range anywhere from the printed page, to computers, to the human brain. For thousands of years, 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 by the brain.
These included everything from scriptures hand written with paper and ink, to hieroglyphics carved into stone. Nevertheless, during the last several decades, advances in technology have exposed a whole new method that has revolutionized the way humans record and retain information: electronic storage media.
Many people are familiar with electronic storage media in the kinds of optical discs, including Video games, Movies and Blu-ray cds, all of which can store music, video, or practically any type of data in any format that can be accessed by using a computer. Optical storage media operates by recording data onto the surface of a disc, which stores information by encoding it in a binary format in the form of “lands” and “pits” – much like 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 laser beam 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 interpreted as unique data. Whilst the discs on their own may be a relatively fragile storage media, the amount of data they can carry is immense. A regular CD can hold about 700mb of data, which if entirely devoted to text data can store the equivalent of thousands upon thousands of written pages.
While written storage media containing this level of text data may weigh several pounds and be so physically cumbersome as to make shipping the data somewhat difficult, a CD weighing only a few grams may contain many books worth of text. What’s more is that while on paper, more data demands more storage space, as a result increasing the physical weight and size of the medium, optical data weighs basically nothing so that a CD stuffed with data weighs only a CD with nothing on it.
And even though making duplicate copies of this much written data would take loads of man hours to manually replicate with a pen and paper, a duplicate CD may be copied and recorded within a few minutes. But that, while paper storage media could possibly be heavy and cumbersome, it requires nothing more to interpret than the human eye. Optical storage media, in contrast, requires other equipment to interpret the info for the user, which itself can be physically cumbersome and vulnerable to damage.
