Hardware - Peripherals
Storage Devices - Optical Disk


An optical disk is impressed with a series of spiral pits in a flat surface.
A master disk is burnt by high-intensity laser beams in bit-patterns from which subsequent copies are formed which can be read optically by laser.


A CD-ROM

The optical disk is a random access storage medium; information can be easily read from any point on the disk. A standard CD-ROM can store up to 650Mb of data, with 14,500 tracks per inch (tpi).

CD-ROM stands for Compact Disk - Read Only Memory. It is now possible to have CD-ROMs where extra tracks of information can be written onto them by the user. These are called read/writable CD-ROMs and these are becoming a popular and cheap method for storage.