How is so much information stored on such a thin layer of material?
When you press skip, how does the reader know how to go to the next track/chapter?
In: Engineering
They’re not paper. They’re plastic. Not sure where that confusion comes from.
The data is encoded as little pits in the plastic, either molded at the printer, or burned with a disk writer. The drive then reads the pits and… lack of pits as 0s and 1s, as computers do.
As for how it knows where to go, that’s because at the very “beginning” of the disk, a specific location the drive knows to look for, will be a bunch of information indexing the contents of the disk, telling the drive where to look for the rest of the data it needs to find.
From there it’s just normal computer stuff, opening and reading electronic files, and displaying you their contents.
Latest Answers