Types of Computer Storage Media

If your computer forgot everything it knew and every project you had worked on each time you turned it off, it wouldn't be a very efficient machine. To keep this from happening, a computer uses various types of storage media to store information in some ongoing fashion. This means every time it starts up, it can load an operating system from a drive and know how to process your data. It can find your data on your drive or optical media and process it. It can also save the resulting files on the drive or media for later use.

Magnetic Tape

Magnetic tape was one of the first-used types of media and is no longer used in modern systems. A large spool of magnetic tape was used to store data in a sequential way in magnetic stripes on the tape. The drawback was that you couldn't just go straight to the file you wanted; you had to start at the beginning and read each file till you found the one you wanted to process.

Magnetic Disk

Replacing tape technology, the magnetic disk is still in common use as the dominant form of storage media, from floppy disks to hard drives. On a magnetic disk, the data is still recorded in magnetic bits on the disk like tape. The main difference is that you can go directly to the data you want to retrieve, instead of having to go through every file. The read/write head of the drive can skip directly to the information you want by using a table of contents to know the location.

Optical Discs

CDs, DVDs and Blue-Ray are examples of optical discs. They use a laser to burn minute pits in a reflective surface to store data. This type of media is not subject to damage from external magnetic fields like hard drives, but they are subject to scratching and have to be kept in a protective case when not inserted into the optical drive.

Volatile Chip

Volatile chip memory is also known as Random Access Memory (RAM) and is used mostly for immediate data transactions. It is not as suitable for long-term data storage, because it loses the data when the electrical current is turned off. It is, however, used for caching data used in the short term, since it is much faster than the hard disk drive.

Solid State

A USB flash drive is a good example of solid state memory. This type of computer storage media is chip-based, so it is fast and it keeps the data even when the current is turned off. This makes it ideal for portable storage applications like file backups. While the size of a USB drive may be small, it can hold several gigabytes of information. Some netbooks are now equipped with solid state hard drives as well.

References

• Media Storage Devices
• Computer Storage Media Types

Resources

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