Introduction
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Optical storage comprises of drives, media and software which is used to store information that is readable by light.

This comprises of technologies such as Compact Discs, DVDs and Blu-Ray media, as well as the drives which are required to read and write from them, such as CD-R's, DVD-RW's and BD-RW.

Optical media is based around removable discs which make this both a disposable and transferable medium. For example, one can burn a set of photographs from an occasion to transfer to another computer which can then be physically disposed of after the information is no longer required.

These differ from other forms of removable media, such as floppy disks which are vastly smaller to USB thumb drives which can be vastly larger.

Whilst optical storage is a method for storing computer data, originally their development stemmed from other sources, such as the music industry for a new form of storing music in the form of compact discs to the film industry with DVDs. The compact discs success from the 1980's rooted the development of the CD as a data medium.

Nowadays, the use of optical media is prevalent in our society. From listening to music and the watching of films to the backing up of important data and authoring of high definition home movies.

Unfortunately, optical media is not without it's downsides, it can be affected by how people treat it (for example, the use of supplied cases) for which, like glass, if it is scratched the quality is degraded.