Exclusive New Types Of Storage Media

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

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

Many people are familiar with electronic storage media in the forms of optical discs, including Compact disks, Dvd disks and Blu-ray dvds, 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" as well as "pits" - comparable to the crests and troughs of an ocean wave, respectively.

These practically 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 set up of lands and pits - 1s and 0s - and these distortions are then read and construed as unique data. As the discs themselves can be a relatively fragile storage media, the amount of data they can hold is immense. A regular CD can hold about 700mb of data, which if entirely committed to text data can store very similar to thousands upon thousands of written pages.

Whereas written storage media made up of this level of text data might weigh several pounds and be so physically cumbersome as to make transporting 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 calls for more storage space, consequently increasing the physical weight and size of the medium, optical data weighs literally nothing so that a CD packed with data weighs no more than a CD with nothing on it.

And while producing duplicate copies of this much written data would take dozens and dozens of man hours to manually duplicate having a pen and paper, a duplicate CD can be copied and recorded within a matter of minutes. However 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 data for the user, which itself can be physically cumbersome and vulnerable to damage.

About the Author

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

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