Why is the digital form of communication and storage of information usually preferred?

Answer 1

Digital communication can be best defined as the use of zeros and ones to store data. Whereas before the concept and design of computers and the ability to store zeros and ones was available, the only choice was to use an analog medium. So the real question is what is wrong with using analog technology, i.e. a video cassette vs a dvd. First there is the obvious reason of size, but more importantly speed and reliability are the reasons for using digital technology as a medium of communication and storage. The two things that make digital faster and more reliable than any other medium is because when you send a digital signal you are actually breaking it up into packets that can be sent in a multitude of different paths yet within a short amount of time they will all meet back up to wherever they were sent and by the same way they were taken broken up, they will all be put back together as if they never were apart. Whereas when you send an analog signal if any part of that signal were to get diverted, then that data would be lost and either have to be resent or stay lost. The same goes for storage. If you use analog to store data, it will eventually lose data just by the nature of the medium it's stored on. Whereas with digital, data can be stored in what are known as disk arrays, and even though it is a given that a physical device will fail, with the right type of disk array, all you have to do is pull out the disk when it goes bad and swap it with an identical make and model and within a few minutes or longer depending on the size and amount of data that is apart of that array, all of your files will restore themselves back to the way it was before the disk went bad to start with. This is called a hot swappable disk drive array and is used in every server on the internet to privately owned servers by business, governments, and even home backup devices or home servers are becoming common place. And because the price and physical space have both shrunk considerably, while performance has gone up in a counter relationship, it is now more expensive to protect all this data than it is to store it. According to a study done by several server providers, the cost to have and maintain a backup power system now cost more than it does to run their servers.