1.3.7

Properties of Optical Storage

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Properties of Optical Media

Optical media provides cheap and robust secondary storage.

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Low cost

  • Optical media is very cheap per-gigabyte (GB).
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Great reliability

  • Optical media is:
    • Waterproof.
    • Shockproof.
  • This makes it ideal for portability (transporting).
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Low capacity

  • Each disk has a low capacity.
  • Disks are small and fairly cheap. So it can be easy to gain a high capacity of storage by buying multiple disks.
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Low speed

  • Because the parts in the optical media drive have to move to find the right bit of data on the disk, access times can be quite slow.
  • Writing to a disk can also be a very slow process.

Jump to other topics

1Components of a Computer

2Software & Software Development

3Exchanging Data

4Data Types, Data Structures & Algorithms

5Legal, Moral, Cultural & Ethical Issues

6Elements of Computational Thinking

6.1Thinking Abstractly

6.2Thinking Ahead

6.3Thinking Procedurally

6.4Thinking Logically

6.5Thinking Concurrently

7Problem Solving & Programming

8Algorithms

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