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Optical storage refers to a class of data storage systems that use light to read or write data to an underlying optical media. Although a number of optical formats have been used over time, the most common examples are optical disks like the compact disc (CD) and DVD.
Optical drives for computers come in two main form factors: half-height (also known as desktop drive) and slim type (used in laptop computers and compact desktop computers). They exist as both internal and external variants. Half-height optical drives are around 4 centimetres tall, while slim type optical drives are around 1 cm tall.
Optical discs are not prone to uncontrollable catastrophic failures such as head crashes, power surges, or exposure to water like hard disk drives and flash storage, since optical drives' storage controllers are not tied to optical discs themselves like with hard disk drives and flash memory controllers, and a disc is usually recoverable from a ...
Paper data storage, e.g. punched cards, punched tapes (now obsolete) Examples of removable media that are standalone plug-and-play devices that carry their own reader hardwares include: USB flash drives [5] Portable storage devices. Dedicated external solid-state drives (SSD) Enclosured mass storage drives, i.e. modified hard disk drives (HDD ...
Optical computing or photonic computing uses light waves produced by lasers or incoherent sources for data processing, data storage or data communication for computing. For decades, photons have shown promise to enable a higher bandwidth than the electrons used in conventional computers (see optical fibers ).
In the history of optical storage media there have been and there are different optical disc formats with different data writing/reading speeds.. Original CD-ROM drives could read data at about 150 kB/s, 1× constant angular velocity (CAV), [1] the same speed of compact disc players without buffering.
A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) [1] [note 1] is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and usually weighs less than 30 g (1 oz).
The following are examples of optical storage media excluded from this article: Holographic data storage - either still in development, or available but generally only encountered in niche usage as of 2007. Laserdisc - not used for recordable data storage in the computing world, although recordable formats did exist briefly.