Computer Hardware Courses Can Teach About Optical Disk Drives And Their UsesThere are various storage mediums in which computer data can be stored. One of these storage mediums is the optical disk drive. Optical disk drives are basically a storage medium from which the data is read and to which it is written to with the help of lasers, and with their growing importance most computer hardware courses should teach about optical disk drives. A large quantity of data can be stored in optical disks. The amount can vary between 256 Mb to 9 GB. Modern day blue ray discs have promised even more storage space. There are mainly three types of optical disks, and a computer course should cover them all fully in order to give the computer hardware student a decent understanding of how to install and maintain these drives. CD-ROM CD ROMS comes with the data already encoded onto them like the audio CDs. The data is not temporary and it can be read as many times as desired. However, data on the CD ROMS cannot be modified. WORMS It stands for write-once, read -many. By employing this kind of disk, you can write the data on this disk only once. After that it appears similar like a CD ROM. Erasable Disks These are those optical disks that can be erased and loaded with fresh data. These are also known as EO, which means Erasable Optical disks. DVDs Then we have DVDs (Digital Video Disks). DVDs are higher capacity optical storage medium in which you can store up to 8.5 GB of data. These are chief types of optical disks which act as a perfect storage device for you precious data. These three technologies are not compatible with one another. Each of these three devices requires different type of disk drive and disk. In fact each have different competing formats although CD ROMS are relatively standardized. Optical disks used as storage device provide a long term, inexpensive way to store the data. They usually provide virtually unlimited storage capacity as you can always buy a new media every time you want to store something. The computer course should cover this in good detail. Optical disks access data sequentially which slows down recovery and back up. However, if you are using optical devices as a storage medium then you should have a reserve device for your continuous logical log file storage volumes. The other devices are available for receiving data from the storage space backups. Various companies have come up with different optical disk drives having several useful features embedded in them. All the latest computers are coming up with an optical drive equipped in them. These drives are gaining popularity as these are removable, and can hold large quantity of data. They are also less vulnerable to shocks and magnetic fields and they can perform over different temperatures. Optical disk drives consist of two basic types . These are CD and DVD. However, the market has also witnessed the launch of the Blue Ray disc and the HD-DVD. They provide even more space than other conventional disk drives. Take time to do some research and make sure that the computer hardware course you enroll on covers the installation and maintenance of optical disk drives fully. |