Part one of term paper
The most common way of storing data in a computer is magnetic. We have hard drives and floppy disks (soon making way to the CD-ROM), both of which can store some amount of data. In a disk drive, a read/write head (usually a coil of wire) passes over a spinning disk, generating an electrical current, which defines a bit as either a 1 or a 0. ...

Part two of term paper
... a short wavelength, so we can place tracks very close together, and the size of the track we use is dependent only on one thing - the color of the light we use. An optical medium typically involves some sort of laser, for laser light does not diverge, so we can pinpoint it to a specific place on the disk. By moving the laser a little bit, we can change tracks on a disk, and this movement is very small, usually less than a hairÕs width. This allows one to store an immense amount of data on one d ...