Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 22nd Edition

Chapter 10. Optical Storage

Optical Technology

There are basically three types of disk storage for computers: magnetic, flash memory, and optical. In magnetic storage, data is recorded magnetically on rotating disks. Flash memory, such as SSDs and flash memory cards, stores information in special memory cells that can be written, erased, and rewritten but retain information when power is turned off. Optical disc storage is similar to magnetic disk storage in basic operation, but it reads and writes using light (optically) instead of magnetism. Although most magnetic disk storage is fully read and write capable many times over, many optical storage media are either read-only or write-once. Note the convention in which we refer to magnetic or ...