Optical Disc - Recordable and Writable Optical Discs

Recordable and Writable Optical Discs

There are numerous formats of optical direct to disk recording devices on the market, all of which are based on using a laser to change the reflectivity of the digital recording medium in order to duplicate the effects of the pits and lands created when a commercial optical disc is pressed. All formats enable reading of computer files as many times as desired by the user, but writing is a different situation. Some formats such as CD-R enable writes to be made only once to each sector on the disk, while other formats CD-RW enable multiple writes to the same sector which is more like a magnetic recording hard disk drive (HDD). In August 2011, a company named Millenniata announced a format called the M-DISC which, reverting to the original technology of optical disks, creates physical pits in a rock-like layer. The M-Disk is stable up to 500 °C (932 °F), is impervious to humidity issues, and is engineered to maintain its integrity for 1,000 years without degradation.