How Computers Work – Course Information



EMMA HS1 Outline Week #11

Optical Drives

How CDs Work

Understanding the CD

Material-Label, Acrylic, Aluminum, and Polycarbonate plastic

The Spiral- 0.5 microns wide

Bumps- (Pits on the other side)

CD player Components

Drive Motor – 200 to 500 RPM depending on what part of disk is being read

Laser & Lens System – focuses in on and read the bumps

Tracking Mechanism – moves the laser assembly

What the CD player does

Laser Focus

Tracking

CD Encoding Issues

CD Data Formats – CD-DA(Audio) and CD-ROM(Computer Data)

Optical Drives & Recording Formats

How CD-ROMs store data – stamped from a die

How CD-Rs store data – Thin layer of dye, high powered laser darkens it

How CD-RWs Store Data – Dye is crystalline & transparent (melted) or amorphous

And non-reflective (when heated by the ‘write’ laser)

How DVDs store data – similar to CDs but multiple layer gold & silver

Reading CDs and DVDs – DVD laser can vary strength to read multiple layers

CD standards for storing data – Red, Yellow, and Orange Books

CD writing and the ISO-9660 format – CD file system

UDF/Packet Writing – file system for Rewritable disks and separate sessions

Understanding CD-R/RW media Read and Write speeds

48x/24x/48x (CD-R write speed)/(CD-RW write speed)/(CD Read Speed) 1X=150KB/s

Understanding CD-R/RW media – Dye life on CD-R, New Drives/Old disks

Video - How a Computer CD Rom Works



How CDs are made



Homework – Optical Drive Online Quiz

Online – How CDs Work

Optical Drives & Recording Formats

How CDs Work

by Marshall Brain

Introduction to How CDs Work

CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to hold music, data or computer software, they have become the standard medium for distributing large quantities of information in a reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and cheap to produce that America Online sends out millions of them every year to entice new users. And if you have a computer and CD-R drive, you can create your own CDs, including any information you want.

In this article, we will look at how CDs and CD drives work. We will also look at the different forms CDs take, as well as what the future holds for this technology.

Understanding the CD: Material

As discussed in How Analog and Digital Recording Works, a CD can store up to 74 minutes of music, so the total amount of digital data that must be stored on a CD is:

44,100 samples/channel/second x 2 bytes/sample x 2 channels x 74 minutes x 60 seconds/minute = 783,216,000 bytes

To fit more than 783 megabytes (MB) onto a disc only 4.8 inches (12 cm) in diameter requires that the individual bytes be very small. By examining the physical construction of a CD, you can begin to understand just how small these bytes are.

A CD is a fairly simple piece of plastic, about four one-hundredths (4/100) of an inch (1.2 mm) thick. Most of a CD consists of an injection-molded piece of clear polycarbonate plastic. During manufacturing, this plastic is impressed with microscopic bumps arranged as a single, continuous, extremely long spiral track of data. We'll return to the bumps in a moment. Once the clear piece of polycarbonate is formed, a thin, reflective aluminum layer is sputtered onto the disc, covering the bumps. Then a thin acrylic layer is sprayed over the aluminum to protect it. The label is then printed onto the acrylic. A cross section of a complete CD (not to scale) looks like this:

|[pic] |

|Cross-section of a CD |

Understanding the CD: The Spiral

|[pic] |

A CD has a single spiral track of data, circling from the inside of the disc to the outside. The fact that the spiral track starts at the center means that the CD can be smaller than 4.8 inches (12 cm) if desired, and in fact there are now plastic baseball cards and business cards that you can put in a CD player. CD business cards hold about 2 MB of data before the size and shape of the card cuts off the spiral.

What the picture on the right does not even begin to impress upon you is how incredibly small the data track is -- it is approximately 0.5 microns wide, with 1.6 microns separating one track from the next. (A micron is a millionth of a meter.) And the bumps are even more miniscule...

Understanding the CD: Bumps

The elongated bumps that make up the track are each 0.5 microns wide, a minimum of 0.83 microns long and 125 nanometers high. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.) Looking through the polycarbonate layer at the bumps, they look something like this:

|[pic] |

You will often read about "pits" on a CD instead of bumps. They appear as pits on the aluminum side, but on the side the laser reads from, they are bumps.

The incredibly small dimensions of the bumps make the spiral track on a CD extremely long. If you could lift the data track off a CD and stretch it out into a straight line, it would be 0.5 microns wide and almost 3.5 miles (5 km) long!

To read something this small you need an incredibly precise disc-reading mechanism. Let's take a look at that.

CD Player Components

The CD player has the job of finding and reading the data stored as bumps on the CD. Considering how small the bumps are, the CD player is an exceptionally precise piece of equipment. The drive consists of three fundamental components:

• A drive motor spins the disc. This drive motor is precisely controlled to rotate between 200 and 500 rpm depending on which track is being read.

• A laser and a lens system focus in on and read the bumps.

• A tracking mechanism moves the laser assembly so that the laser's beam can follow the spiral track. The tracking system has to be able to move the laser at micron resolutions.

|[pic] |

|Inside a CD player |

What the CD Player Does: Laser Focus

Inside the CD player, there is a good bit of computer technology involved in forming the data into understandable data blocks and sending them either to the DAC (in the case of an audio CD) or to the computer (in the case of a CD-ROM drive).

The fundamental job of the CD player is to focus the laser on the track of bumps. The laser beam passes through the polycarbonate layer, reflects off the aluminum layer and hits an opto-electronic device that detects changes in light. The bumps reflect light differently than the "lands" (the rest of the aluminum layer), and the opto-electronic sensor detects that change in reflectivity. The electronics in the drive interpret the changes in reflectivity in order to read the bits that make up the bytes.

What the CD Player Does: Tracking

The hardest part is keeping the laser beam centered on the data track. This centering is the job of the tracking system. The tracking system, as it plays the CD, has to continually move the laser outward. As the laser moves outward from the center of the disc, the bumps move past the laser faster -- this happens because the linear, or tangential, speed of the bumps is equal to the radius times the speed at which the disc is revolving (rpm). Therefore, as the laser moves outward, the spindle motor must slow the speed of the CD. That way, the bumps travel past the laser at a constant speed, and the data comes off the disc at a constant rate.

CD Encoding Issues

|[pic] |

|Photo courtesy Ernest von Rosen, AMGmedia |

|Recordable CD |

If you have a CD-R drive, and want to produce your own audio CDs or CD-ROMs, one of the great things you've got going in your favor is the fact that software can handle all the details for you. You can say to your software, "Please store these songs on this CD," or "Please store these data files on this CD-ROM," and the software will do the rest. Because of this, you don't need to know anything about CD data formatting to create your own CDs. However, CD data formatting is complex and interesting, so let's go into it anyway.

To understand how data are stored on a CD, you need to understand all of the different conditions the designers of the data encoding methodology were trying to handle. Here is a fairly complete list:

• Because the laser is tracking the spiral of data using the bumps, there cannot be extended gaps where there are no bumps in the data track. To solve this problem, data is encoded using EFM (eight-fourteen modulation). In EFM, 8-bit bytes are converted to 14 bits, and it is guaranteed by EFM that some of those bits will be 1s.

• Because the laser wants to be able to move between songs, data needs to be encoded into the music telling the drive "where it is" on the disc. This problem is solved using what is known as subcode data. Subcode data can encode the absolute and relative position of the laser in the track, and can also encode such things as song titles.

• Because the laser may misread a bump, there need to be error-correcting codes to handle single-bit errors. To solve this problem, extra data bits are added that allow the drive to detect single-bit errors and correct them.

• Because a scratch or a speck on the CD might cause a whole packet of bytes to be misread (known as a burst error), the drive needs to be able to recover from such an event. This problem is solved by actually interleaving the data on the disc, so that it is stored non-sequentially around one of the disc's circuits. The drive actually reads data one revolution at a time, and un-interleaves the data in order to play it.

• If a few bytes are misread in music, the worst thing that can happen is a little fuzz during playback. When data is stored on a CD, however, any data error is catastrophic. Therefore, additional error correction codes are used when storing data on a CD-ROM.

CD Data Formats

There are several different formats used to store data on a CD, some widely used and some long-forgotten. The two most common are CD-DA (audio) and CD-ROM (computer data).

Optical Drives & Recording Formats

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Compact disks are primarily composed of Polycarbonate, a transparent hard plastic, onto which additional incredibly thin layers of metal and plastic are added to reflect laser light and protect the data surface of the CD. This much is true of all Compact disks.

There is a large difference between mass produced 'stamped' CDs and CD-ROMs (Compact Disk - Read Only Memory) such as you would buy in a music or software store, and the CDs intended for use in a CD burner however.

Stamped CDs are produced by injection-molding the polycarbonate plastic into a die which contains tiny pattern of raised bumps along the surface. These bumps, and the flat areas between them ('lands') are the means by which the data is read from the finished CD by a laser.

This surface is then coated by a thin layer of metal (usually silver or aluminum) to provide a reflective surface on the 'top' of the disk (the label side) so that light can be reflected back through the reading side of the CD. A thin layer of plastic tops this metal layer, followed by the label, silk-screened onto the top.

This is your common everyday audio CD, and it also explains why all recordable disk manufacturers stress that ball point pens should never be used to write on a CD. Press too hard, and you could literally pen away the data on the disk.

How CD-Rs store data

As the CD is read from the bottom by a tiny reading laser, the light shines up through the transparent polycarbonate and strikes the metal layer where it is reflected. If the laser shines onto one of the flat portions of the disk (the 'lands') it will be reflected almost straight back and read by the optical sensor of the CD-drive.

If the laser shines onto one of the molded bumps, which as the CD is read from the bottom, appear as 'pits,' it will be reflected at an angle and not picked up by the sensor. By precisely timing the speed at which the laser moves over the surface of the CD, and calculating positive reflections as values of '1' and non-reflections as values of '0,' digital data can be read from a CD.

CD-R disks, or recordable CDs, work in a similar fashion, with one major exception. As they are blank until imprinted with data, they are not 'stamped' or injection molded at the factory. Rather, a thin layer of dye is added between the polycarbonate and the reflective metal layer.

This dye is completely clear until the more powerful writing laser of a CD-R drive is used to darken it, covering the reflective metal underneath. By selectively darkening minute sections of this dye layer, a reflective/non-reflective pattern is created which can be read in exactly the same fashion as a conventional 'stamped' CD.

How CD-RWs store data

CD-RW disks, or rewritable CDs, use yet another system. In place of the dye layer used by recordable CDs, they use a special compound which reacts to the various levels of heat provided by the 'write' or 'erase' lasers of a CD-RW drive. When activated the dye becomes crystalline and transparent/melted (its default state) or amorphous and non-reflective (when heated by the 'write' laser).

The melted, non-crystalline areas signify a binary '0' while the crystalline, transparent areas allow the read laser to reflect off the metal underneath and signify a binary '1.' Unlike recordable CDs, whose dye layer cannot be reused once it has been written to, passing a laser over the CD-RW surface at a certain intensity will cause the melted compound to retake its crystalline form and regain its transparency, effectively erasing all the data on the disk.

How DVDs store data

Commercial DVDs are formed using a similar process to 'stamped' CDs, except that multiple thin layers of polycarbonate are molded, one for each data 'layer' of the disk. A DVD can have up to two layers on each side of the disk, for a total of four. The reading of multiple tracks on a single side is enabled by using a semi-transparent gold film as the reflective material for the first layer of data on a two-layer DVD, and a fully reflective aluminum coating for the second.

In this way, the reading laser can be modulated to pass through or reflect from the gold layer, depending on whether data from the first or second layer is desired.

Otherwise, DVD data is stored using bumps and 'lands' to represent digital information, the same as CDs. The tracks of data on a DVD are considerably smaller and tighter packed than on a CD however, enabling DVD's considerably higher data capacity.

Reading CDs and DVDs

As mentioned previously, a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive uses a laser to read data, continually firing it at the reflective surface of the disk. An optical sensor synchronized with the laser records any direct reflection returned from the disk as a digital '1' and the lack of a reflection as a '0.' The bumps ('pits') and lands that guide the reflection of the laser are formed into a continuous spiral track over the surface of the CD.

The laser needs to pass over this track at a constant speed in order to reliably read data from it, so the motor of the CD drive varies the speed that it spins the CD in order to accommodate reading from the inside tracks to the outside edge of the CD at a consistent rate.

DVDs work in a similar manner, with the addition of the ability to vary the strength of the reading laser in order to read the multiple layers of data that may be present on a DVD disk.

CD standards for storing data.

As the current CD format was gradually established, a series of technology guidelines, called 'books' were put forward to guide how CDs handle the storage of data and guarantee compatibility. A brief synopsis of the ones important to this article follows:

Red Book - 1980 - the audio CD standard. Allows for 74 minutes of digital audio on a single CD, and up to 99 tracks.

Yellow Book - 1983 - An extension of the Redbook standard to cover the use of CDs as a data storage medium (CD-ROM).

Orange Book - 1988 - An extension of the Yellow Book standard to allow writeable CDs. Essentially created the CD-R as we know it. Later revised to allow multiple 'sessions' per disk each with its own table of contents, meaning that the entire disk did not have to be written at one time. This is known as multi-session writing.

Like any other method of mass storage, writeable CDs need a file-system to arrange the data that is written to them. Given the relatively rigid nature of writing to CD as opposed to a hard-disk drive, where any section can be written to or written over at will, data CDs have no need for a constantly updated catalog of the contents of the disk. Rather, they need a simple table of contents to guide the reading device.

CD writing, and the 'ISO-9660' format.

The most common data CD file system is the ISO 9660 format. Drafted by the International Organization of Standards in 1988, and modified and added to many times since then, it is the accepted standard for storing data on CD.

If you are burning files to a CD-R disk, you are using the ISO 9660 file system.

ISO 9660 CDs can be read by any modern operating system (though the files on the CD may not be useable), thus MP3 files stored on a CD burned in an iMAC could be read by a Windows system, even though the two computers' operating systems normally cannot read each-other's files.

In simple terms, an ISO 9660 formatted CD contains a list of the contents of that particular CD, including the number of sessions, directories, subdirectories and files, their names and where to physically locate them on the disk. This data is read first by the drive once the disk is inserted, and is subsequently kept in memory, reducing the time needed to find data on the disk. Unlike other file systems intended for use on magnetic disks, ISO 9660 provides no way to delete or add to a file once it has been written to the disk, reflecting the inflexible nature of CD-R/RW media.

UDF/Packet Writing

The one major disadvantage of the standard ISO 9660 format for creating CDs is that it requires a lot of overhead. If you wish to copy several small sets of data to a CD-R or CD-RW over a certain time period, making daily backups for example, the system will need to create a separate session for each set of data.

As each session requires its own lead-in which contains the table of contents and data needed to synchronize the reader for the data to follow, and lead-out space, the overhead for creating a session equates to 13MB of wasted space. The UDF file system is an alternative method of storage, created to allow small files to be efficiently added to CD media without wasting space.

In effect, the CD will appear as a form of removable media like a floppy disk, once formatted with the UDF file system.

This method does have some drawbacks of its own though; any information written to the disk has a minimum size of 32KB, meaning that files smaller than this will take up a 32K block of space regardless, resulting in a fair bit of wasted space. Originally, the UDF file system required that the whole CD be erased before space created by deleting files could be used again, but newer revisions of the format allow for random deleting. This modification allows individual sectors of the disk to be erased and reused on the fly.

UDF disks still require formatting before use, which can take a long time. Also, compatibility can be a real issue, as older CD-ROMs and early CD-R drives will not read CDs created using packet writing, and so software must be installed to create the disks. Newer packet writing technologies such as the Mount Rainier standard provide faster formatting and less wasted space, but still need additional software to read the created CDs. More on Mt. Rainier in a moment.

Understanding CD-R/RW media Read and Write speeds

There are a variety of types of CD-R and RW media on the market, and it can be bewildering at times, though concerns about the physical makeup of CD-R disks have become somewhat marginalized as the technology has become commonplace and the price of individual disks has plummeted.

There are some things that the buyer should look out for still, the most important of these being the rated speed of the disks.

As you will have noticed, CD burners are rated for the speed in which they can create and read CDs. These speeds are generally listed in the format (CD-R write speed)/(CD-RW write speed)/(CD read speed); for example 48x/24x/48x. The speed is calculated by taking the 150KB per second transfer rate of a 1X CD-ROM drive and multiplying it. The trouble is that the media you use may or may not be able to keep up with the burner, depending on the process used to manufacture it.

Using a CD-R disk made a few years ago on a modern 48X or above CD-RW drive, for example, is just not likely to work well, resulting in errors or outright failure unless you reduce the write speed of the drive considerably. Modern CD-R media is produced to take the higher write speeds into account, so the best practice is to make sure the advertised acceptable speed of the disks you are buying matches the speed of your burner.

Note that this is not a hard and fast rule.... media that is not advertised as 48X compatible may in fact work at that speed, it's just not guaranteed to, so proceed at the risk of making lovely drink coasters. Using higher speed rated media on a lower rated burner will work fine, of course.

Understanding CD-R/RW media

 The next option to consider when choosing recordable CD-R/RWs is the capacity of the media you use. CD-Rs and CD-RWs are easily available in 650MB/74min and 700MB/80min sizes, though larger capacities can be found.

Consistent with the speed rule listed above, the newer the drive, the less likely it is to have difficulties with higher capacity media. Older drives may have issues because of the increased density of the data tracks in the higher capacity disks. Any writer made within the last 3-4 years should be fine with at least the 650 and 700MB media.

The last possible issue is the color of the CD-R. Now this was a really hot topic a few years ago when CD writers were coming onto the mass-market, with heavy debates on all sides. The issue is which combination of dye and reflective material provides the best compatibility, and which dye gives CD-R media the most longevity?

The color of the bottom of a CD-R disk is a combination of the dye type and the reflective layer of metal. For example, the combination of Cyanine (one of the most popular dyes) and a silver reflective layer results in a blue/green sheen. Older writers were noted for liking some color combinations better than others, resulting in a lot of wasted CDs and frustration.

Again, any newer CD-RW drive should not be particularly fussy when it comes to the color of the disks you feed it, but the best method here is to visit the manufacturer's website and check their list of compatible media. Come to think of it, this is the best method for dealing with all the issues we've just listed.

The subject of data-fastness and longevity of CD-media is still being debated, and likely will be for a while. Artificial 'rapid-aging' tests on various CD-R media types have shown that gold reflective disks seem to hold readable data for longer than other colors of CD. Some estimates give as long as a hundred years before the dye becomes unreadable, even the cheapest of disks is likely to hold its data for more than a decade, provided it is well cared for.

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