Optical disc

nounStandard termElectronics

A flat, circular storage medium read and written by lasers.

A removable data storage format that uses microscopic pits and lands on a reflective surface to represent digital information. A laser beam scans the spinning surface, and a photodiode translates the reflections back into a bitstream.

Heard on the job

The legacy test equipment still requires a bootable optical disc for firmware updates.