Storage device
Alternatively referred to as storage,storage media, or storage medium, astorage device is a hardware device capable of holding information. There are two storage devices used in computers; aprimary storage device such as computerRAM and a secondary storage device such as a computer hard drive. The secondary storage could be a removable, internal, orexternal storage. In the picture to the right, is an example of a Drobo, an external secondary storage device.
Without a storage device, you and your computer would not be able to save any settings or information and would be considered a dumb terminal. Below, are some additional examples of storage devices that are used with computers.
Types of computer storage
- Floppy diskette
- CD-ROM disc
- CD-R and CD-RW disc
- Cloud storage
- DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW disc
- Jump drive and USB flash drive
- Hard drive
- LS-120
- Tape cassette
- Zip diskette
Hard drive
Alternatively referred to as a hard disk drive and abbreviated as HD orHDD, the hard drive is the computer's main storage media device that permanently stores all data on the computer. The hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1956 and consists of one or more hard drive platters inside of air sealed casing. Most computer hard drives are in an internal drive bay at the front of the computer and connect to the motherboard using either ATA, SCSI, or a SATA cable and power cable. Below, is a picture of what the inside of a hard drive looks like for a desktop and laptop hard drive.
As can be seen in the above picture, the desktop hard drive has six components: the head actuator, read/write actuator arm, read/write head, spindle, and platter. On the back of a hard drive is a circuit board called the disk controller.
Tip: New users often confuse memory (RAM) with disk drive space. See our memory definition for a comparison between memory and storage.
FDD
A Floppy Disk Drive, or FDD or FD for short, is a computer disk drive that enables a user to save data to removable diskettes. Although 8" disk drives were first made available in 1971, the first real disk drives used were the 5 1/4" floppy disk drives, which were later replaced with 3 1/2" floppy disk drives. Today, because of the limited capacity and reliability of floppy diskettes many computers no longer come equipped with floppy disk drives and are being replaced with CD-R, other writable discs, and flash drives.
Above is an example of each of the different floppy drives. As can be seen, the size of the floppy drive and the diskettes they use have decreased over time.
Jump drive
1. Alternatively referred to as a USB flash drive,data stick, pen drive, keychain drive andthumb drive, a jump drive is a portable drivethat is often the size of your thumb that connects to the computer USB port. Today, flash drives are available in sizes such as 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 5GB, and 16GB and are an easy way to transfer and store information.Cloud computing
A term used to describe services over a network by a collection of servers. These computers or cloud of computers enable the users visiting to have access to much faster computers or servers, be able to access programs and services from anywhere with Internet access often without having to install other software, and get access to the services from any device capable of reaching the network or Internet.
Because the term cloud computing is a broad term, it's likely if you've spent any time on the Internet or use devices connected to the Internet that you've used some cloud computing.
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