Optical Storage Devices

ALSO CALLED: WORM Drives, Optical Disk Libraries, Jukeboxes, Write-Once-Read-Many Devices, Optical Storage, Optical Jukeboxes, Write-Once-Read-Many Drives, WORM Devices
DEFINITION: An optical disc is an electronic data storage medium that can be written to and read using a low-powered laser beam. Originally developed in the late 1960s, the first optical disc, created by James T. Russell, stored data as micron-wide dots of light and dark. A laser read the dots, and the data was converted to an electrical signal, and finally to audio or visual output. However, the technology  … 
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OPTICAL STORAGE DEVICES DEFINITION (continued): …  didn't appear in the marketplace until Philips and Sony came out with the compact disc (CD) in 1982. Since then, there has been a constant succession of optical disc formats, first in CD formats, followed by a number of DVD formats.Optical disc offers a number of advantages over magnetic storage media. An optical disc holds much more data. The greater control and focus possible with laser beams (in comparison to tiny magnetic heads) means that more data can be written into a smaller space. Storage capacity increases with each new generation of optical media. Emerging standards, such as Blu-ray, … 
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