SECONDARY STORAGE MEDIA
Hard Disk drive :- Magnetic, capacity ranges from 40Mb to 100’s of Gb but 10 to
30 Giga bytes is common. Most hard disk drives are moving head and fixed into
the system unit.
ZIP Drives :- Magnetic, 100Mb or 250Mb capacity, removable/exchangeable.
Expensive alternative to floppy disks.
Floppy Disk drive :- Magnetic, 1.44Mb capacity, removable/exchangeable.
Slower and more unreliable than a hard disk drive but convenient for moving data
from one computer to another. Watch out for viruses!
Micro-floppy disk:- A mini floppy disk sometimes found on laptop and palm top
computers.
CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory) :- Optical, 650Mb capacity.
CD-R (Compact Disk Recordable) :- Allows you to record your own CD-ROM’s
CD-RW (Compact Disk ReWritable) :- Uses a special Compact Disk that is
reusable, but note that not all CD-ROM drives can read these special ReWritable
CD’s.
DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) :- Optical, capacities vary but 4.7 Gb and 8.5 Gb
are common.
Some devices use a combination of Magnetic and Optical techniques to store data
these are Magneto-optical disks.
Common Backup Devices
A Backup is a copy of all the important files on your system in case your hard disk
drive fails.
Tape Drive or Tape Streamer :- Magnetic, sequential device with very high
storage capacities up to 100’s of Gigabytes. Similar to a music cassette or video
tape. Common makes of tape include DAT, DLT, HP and EXABYTE.
CD-R and CD-RW are sometimes used as backup devices.
TERMS ASSOCIATED WITH STORAGE DEVICES
Platter :- Hard disk drives contain a number of platters or disks of magnetizable
material.
Each platter on a hard disk is divided into tracks and sectors.
Track :- If a read/write head remains still as the platter spins the read/write head
passes over a single track on the platter. The tracks are concentric circles on the
platter.
Sector :- Each track is divided into many sectors.
Cylinder :- When the read/write heads remain still tracks on each platter can be
accessed. This is a cylinder.
The speed of a hard disk drive depends on two main factors seek time and latency.
Seek time is the time it takes to move the read/write head to the correct track.
Latency is the time that the read/write head has to wait for the correct sector to
come round. Latency depends on how fast the disk is rotating.
Access time = Seek time + Latency time.
A typical disk drive has
16 heads, which means 8 platters.
6,253 Tracks.
63 Sectors per track.
512 Bytes per sector, which means
512*63*6,253*16 = 3,227,148,288 bytes
or approximately 3 Giga bytes.
Disk drives are direct access devices, sectors can be accessed in any order.
Magnetic tapes usually have 8 tracks allowing 1 byte to be stored across the tape.
Tape drives are serial or sequential devices, bytes are accessed in order from the
beginning to the end of the tape.
Buffer:- Disk drives have memory of their own. This allows the disk drive to
accept data from the CPU faster than it can write it to the disk. Think of the buffer
as a waiting area for data between the CPU and the disk drive.
