Optical Storage: Future Educational Impact

Optical storage is a recent development that involves the reproduction of text, audio, and video data onto an optical disk storage medium. The advancements made in mass storage because of the development of Optical Storage technology, and their impact on educational and industrial computer environments, is the focus of this article. The three types of optical storage are Compact Disk-Read Only Memory (CD-ROM), Write-Once, Read Many (WORM), and Erasable Optical. Some of the advantages of optical storage over magnetic tape and disk include large storage capacity, removability, and low cost per MegaByte of storage. Conversely, the current shortcoming of both disk sizes is they are read only, although this is changing as reusable optical disks become widely available. Both the educational and industrial sectors have taken advantage of these developments to generate applications that are tailored to their specific needs. These products' capabilities have yet to be fully realized; but it appears that in the future, optical storage will replace magnetic storage.