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The basic unit of digital storage is a bit, storing a single 0 or 1. Many common instruction set architectures can address more than 8 bits of data at a time. For example, 32-bit x86 processors have 32-bit general-purpose registers and can handle 32-bit (4-byte) data in single instructions. However, data in memory may be of various lengths.
[citation needed] Content-addressable storage is similar to content-addressable memory. CAS systems work by passing the content of the file through a cryptographic hash function to generate a unique key, the "content address". The file system's directory stores these addresses and a pointer to the physical storage of the content. Because an ...
Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a special type of computer memory used in certain very-high-speed searching applications. It is also known as associative memory or associative storage and compares input search data against a table of stored data, and returns the address of matching data. [1]
Tertiary storage or tertiary memory [7] is a level below secondary storage. Typically, it involves a robotic mechanism which will mount (insert) and dismount removable mass storage media into a storage device according to the system's demands; such data are often copied to secondary storage before use. It is primarily used for archiving rarely ...
A portion of the computer main memory can be set up as a RAM disk that serves as a storage device for a file system. File systems such as tmpfs can store files in virtual memory. A virtual file system provides access to files that are either computed on request, called virtual files (see procfs and sysfs), or are mapping into another, backing ...
A direct-access storage device (DASD) (pronounced / ˈ d æ z d iː /) is a secondary storage device in which "each physical record has a discrete location and a unique address". The term was coined by IBM to describe devices that allowed random access to data, the main examples being drum memory and hard disk drives . [ 1 ]
Read-only memory (ROM) is also a WORM medium. Such memory may contain the instructions to a computer to read the operating system from another storage device such as a hard disk. The non-technical end-user, however, cannot write the ROM even once but considers it part of the unchangeable computing platform.
The Content Addressable File Store (CAFS) [1] was a hardware device developed by International Computers Limited (ICL) that provided a disk storage with built-in search capability. The motivation for the device was the discrepancy between the high speed at which a disk could deliver data, and the much lower speed at which a general-purpose ...