Optical Data Storage [electronic resource] : Phase-Change Media and Recording / by Erwin R. Meinders, Andrei V. Mijiritskii, Liesbeth Pieterson, Matthias Wuttig.

Theoretical aspects of phase-change alloys -- Thermal modelling of phase-change recording -- Data recording characteristics -- Recording media.

1. 1. A briefovervi ew ofopt ical storage systems Today’s optical storage system stems fro m a small scale product developed by Philips and commercially launched in 1978. This system was the result of the Videodisc project that was running at the Philips Research labs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, through the 1970s. [1] It was pioneering laser based optical storage and was based onan analogue videodisc. The product never broke the boundaries of its market niche and at its decline the number of contents titles was quite limited. However, with its optical pick up head, servo electronics, disc mastering principles, and fine mechanics it formed a basis for the optical storage technology employed nowadays. Unlike its predecessor, the nextgene ration system was to revolutionize the world of data storage. The fruits of a close collaboration betweenPh ilips and Sony were officially made public in19 79 in the form of a worldwide standard. The first product became commercially available in1 983u nder the name of Compact Disc (CD). This was a shiny 12 cm disc carrying about 74 minutes of music in a digital format. [2] Fosteredb y the fastgr owthof c omputer industry a CD for com puter applications – Compact Disc Read Only Memory (CD ROM) was introduced on the market in 1985. The disc could holdup t o 650 megabyte (MB) ofdat a and at 1x disc speed the data transfer rate was 4. 3 Megabit per second (Mbps).