No, this isn’t going to be about a new superhero trio in the Marvel universe.
This is all about our precious digital data.
Forget Iron Man and Thor we’re talking about storage drives!
Links to the articles published in the series so far is below.
You might have a desktop PC at work or home.
But how well do you know the components that make up a PC?
Blinded by the light
You don’t have to use magnetism or electrical charge to store data.
It can be done using light, or more rather, the reflection of it.
Although his system is nothing like what we use today, the overall concept is pretty similar.
It wasn’t until 1987 that the first fully re-writeable CD, appeared on the market.
Around 1995 we got our hands on a better version of the CD.
This is all very nice, but how it doeswork?
Don’t worry about the connections on this one, as desktop PC models usethe same SATA connectionas HDDs.
We can see this more clearly, by flipping it over.
This is the business end of the drive unit.
Here we can see a plastic housing, holding the laser system.
The read latency is truly abysmal but the write latency is pretty sweet.
That’s a total storage capacity of 1.25 TB!
Taken them apart, looked at how they worked, and left a mess everywhere, as usual.
And the job they do is immensely challenging and at the same time, super important.
Yeah, forget Star-Lord and Rocket storage drives are the real guardians of our galaxy.
Stay tuned for more anatomy lessons.
Masthead credit:Deni M
