Blank storage media, it its most limited, basic sense, is any medium in which data or information can be stored for further accessibility. This could range between the printed page, to computers, to the human brain. For thousands of years, blank media was - while varied - limited to techniques that involved physically marking an object (the storage medium itself) with information that could further be read by the human eye and refined from the brain.
These involved everything from scriptures hand written with paper and ink, to hieroglyphics carved into stone. Nonetheless, within the last several decades, improvements in technology have exposed a whole new method that has revolutionized the way humans record and keep information: electronic storage media.
Many people are familiar with electronic storage media in the kinds of optical discs, including CDs, Movies and Blu-ray cds, all of which can store music, video, or essentially any kind of data in any format that can be accessed by using a computer. Optical storage media works by recording data onto the surface of a disc, which stores information by encoding it in a binary format in the form of "lands" along with "pits" - comparable to the crests and troughs of an ocean wave, respectively.
These almost microscopic grooves signify data as binary code where lands equal a 1 and pits a 0, which is then read by reflecting a laser light off the surface of the disc. The reflection of the laser is distorted by the set up of lands along with pits - 1s and 0s - and these distortions are then read and translated as unique statistics. Whilst the discs by themselves can be a relatively fragile storage media, the amount of data they can carry is tremendous. A regular CD can hold about 700mb of data, which if entirely dedicated to text data can store very similar to thousands upon thousands of written pages.
Whilst written storage media that contains this level of text data may weigh several pounds and be so physically cumbersome as to make shipping the data somewhat difficult, a CD weighing only a few grams can contain dozens of books worth of text. What's more is that while on paper, more data requires more storage space, consequently increasing the physical weight and size of the medium, optical data weighs virtually nothing so that a CD packed with data weighs a maximum of a CD with nothing on it.
And while making duplicate copies of this much written data would likely take tons of man hours to manually duplicate using a pen and paper, a duplicate CD could be copied and recorded within a few minutes. But that, while paper storage media could possibly be heavy and cumbersome, it requires nothing more to interpret than the human eye. Optical storage media, in contrast, calls for other equipment to interpret the information for the user, which itself can be physically cumbersome as well as vulnerable to damage.
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Article by Paul Wise. When it comes to Storage media, Paul suggests Tapes.com for great advice on media CD blank for you
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