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When used within a robotic tape library, it is classified as tertiary storage instead. Read/Write DVD drive with cradle for media extended. Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of ...
Current hard drives connect to a computer over one of several bus types, including parallel ATA, Serial ATA, SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Fibre Channel. Some drives, especially external portable drives, use IEEE 1394, or USB. All of these interfaces are digital; electronics on the drive process the analog signals from the read/write heads.
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a type of solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuits to store data persistently. It is sometimes called semiconductor storage device, solid-state device, or solid-state disk. [1] [2] SSDs rely on non-volatile memory, typically NAND flash, to store data in memory cells. The performance and endurance of ...
Drives with smaller media generally conformed to de facto standard form factors. The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. When hard drives became available for personal computers, they offered 5-megabyte capacity. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity in the range of 500 megabyte to 1 ...
Disk storage is now used in both computer storage and consumer electronic storage, e.g., audio CDs and video discs (VCD, DVD and Blu-ray). Data on modern disks is stored in fixed length blocks, usually called sectors and varying in length from a few hundred to many thousands of bytes. Gross disk drive capacity is simply the number of disk ...
RAM drive – a block of random-access memory that the operating system treats as if it were secondary storage; Sequential access memory – a class of data storage devices that read stored data in a sequence; Wear leveling – a technique for prolonging the service life of some kinds of erasable computer storage media, such as flash memory
The computer case holds the motherboard, fixed or removable disk drives for data storage, the power supply, and may contain other peripheral devices such as modems or network interfaces. Some models of desktop computers integrated the monitor and keyboard into the same case as the processor and power supply.
The notion of "large" amounts of data is of course highly dependent on the time frame and the market segment, as storage device capacity has increased by many orders of magnitude since the beginnings of computer technology in the late 1940s and continues to grow; however, in any time frame, common mass storage devices have tended to be much larger and at the same time much slower than common ...