Optical storage | Definition & Facts | Britannica
Optical storage, electronic storage medium that uses low-power laser beams to record and retrieve digital (binary) data. In optical-storage technology,
Optical storage, electronic storage medium that uses low-power laser beams to record and retrieve digital (binary) data. In optical-storage technology, a laser beam encodes digital data onto an optical, or laser, disk in the form of tiny pits. Learn more about optical storage in this article.
Optical storage provides greater memory capacity than magnetic storage because laser beams can be controlled and focused much more precisely than can tiny magnetic heads, thereby enabling the condensation of data into a much smaller space.
Optical-scanning equipment is similarly durable because it has relatively few moving parts. Early optical disks were not erasable—i.e., data encoded onto their surfaces could be read but not erased or rewritten. This problem was solved in the 1990s with the development of WORM and of writable/rewritable disks.
optical disc On optical discs such as compact discs (CDs) and digital videodiscs (DVDs), information is stored as a series of lands, or flat areas, and pits. A laser assembly reads the spinning disc, converting lands and pits into sequences of electric signals.
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