Digital Storage

I always admire the advancements in the information technology, which went so wide and in such great pace. When I was studying about the digital technology (some 6-7 years before), I used to wonder how this 0 -1 combination could work out such wonders.

Those times (even now), the storage media was advancing highly. The size was going smaller, while the capacity was going higher and higher. The Compact Disc (CD) uses optical technology, by burning 'pits' into the disk while writing and using a laser diode to illuminate and read. This can easily represent the 0-1 combinations of the digital world. We can see different kinds of handy portable digital media in the market including CDs, DVDs, USB devices, etc.

Now we have another contradictory thing that is the analog one. We have started with the analog things (including storage devices) and ended up with digital solutions. But what we see in the real world is actually analog. We cant imagine a digital world in our real life where everything is either true or false, set or reset, etc. What I think, is the analog technology can much stronger/faster than the digital one. But designing an analog system might be more complicated.

When I was studying about Compact Disk, I was curious of another fact. We store bits by burning the disk. And in the application part, we never read it as individual bits. We read it atleast as bytes. Hence, why cant we store them as bytes itself. Instead of 'dark pits' we can use colors on the disk. The CD writer will write small tint of colors into the disk. The optical reader should recognize the colors and read it out. This would improve the speed and increase the storage space even more; if the size is kept constant.

Time has passed, but still I dont see a similar kind of storage, in the market. In my example of using colors, we can have 256 colors or millions of color combinations written which will multiply the number of bits represented in a single tint of color. But that may result in slower app performance, although the storage size can be reduced highly.

Is this an analog solution? I am not sure. But still I think storing as bytes would be a better way in a storage media. But we see the serial busses are getting more popular than parallel ones. Also 'The simpler, the more popular" is working out in most scenarios. So I dunno how much my thinking is relevant to the present scenario.