How Storage Media Comes In Handy
Storage media blank, it its most constrained, fundamental sense, is any medium in which data or information could be stored for later admittance. This may range between the printed page, to computers, to the human brain. For thousands of years, blank media was – while varied – 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 processed by the brain.
These involved everything from scriptures hand written with paper and ink, to hieroglyphics carved into stone. However, in the last several decades, improvements in technology have exposed a whole new avenue that has revolutionized the way humans record and keep information: electronic storage media.
Most people are accustomed to electronic storage media in the forms of optical discs, including Compact disks, DVDs and Blu-ray discs, all of which can store music, video, or essentially any sort of data in any format that can be accessed by using a computer. Optical storage media functions by recording data onto the top of a disc, which stores information by encoding it in a binary file format in the form of “lands” and “pits” – similar to the crests and troughs of an ocean wave, respectively.
These nearly microscopic grooves signify data as binary code where lands equal a 1 and pits a 0, which is then read by reflecting a laser light off the surface of the disc. The reflection of the laser is distorted by the set up of lands as well as pits – 1s and 0s – and these distortions are then read and translated as unique statistics. Whilst the discs themselves can be a relatively fragile storage media, the amount of data they can store is immense. A regular CD can hold about 700mb of data, which if entirely committed to text data can store the same as thousands upon thousands of written pages.
While written storage media containing this level 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 contain dozens of books worth of text. What’s more is that while on paper, more data demands more storage space, consequently increasing the physical weight and size of the medium, optical data weighs literally nothing so that a CD crammed with data weighs no more than a CD with nothing on it.
And even though producing duplicate copies of this much written data would probably take dozens and dozens of man hours to manually copy with a pen and paper, a duplicate CD could be copied and recorded within a few minutes. But that, while paper storage media might 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 info for the user, which alone can be physically cumbersome and also vulnerable to damage.