1.2.15

Properties of Optical Media

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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

1Computer Systems

1.1Systems Architecture

1.2Memory & Storage

1.3Computer Networks, Connections & Protocols

1.4Network Security

1.5Systems Software

1.6Ethical, Legal, Cultural & Environmental Concern

2Computational Thinking, Algorithms and Programming

2.1Algorithms

2.2Programming Fundamentals

2.3Producing Robust Programs

2.4Boolean Logic

2.5Programming Languages & IDEs

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