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Chapter 7 System Storage

 

In this chapter the book covers all forms of system storage (even some that aren't truly “system storage”). For this summery of the chapter even though the book lightly covers RAM I will not be mentioning it any further as it is covered more thourally in another chapter. The most relevant (by mainstream use) of the the storage devices covered in this chapter are Hard disks, floppy disks, CD/DVD,s, Flash drives, and Microfilm.

We will start here with hard drives, It is pretty safe to say that all PCs have a hard drive be it a SATA, EIDE, SCSI, or SAS. These are the controller interfaces of standard hard drives the most common for PCs being ATA and SATA. Here in the characteristics of a hard drive is where we should branch off and add to the book, as the book tells you that hard drives have platters that are magnetically charged disks which are formatted most commonly in one of two form factors NTSF or FAT 32 (I don't remember if the book tells you that or not) FAT 32 being the more recognized but NTSF being slightly more efficient. These cylindrical pallets revolve around a Read/Write head that do exactly what there name implies either extract or add information to the disk. It is now time to step away from the book and cover the other type of hard drive Solid State drives. These drives are far superior to the classic platter drives as they have no moving parts, instead they have an array if flash cards that the information is stored on and have read/write speed far superior to that of a classic hard drive. They are commonly found with SATA controllers and are still a bit pricey for there storage capacities but that will quickly change as they are now commonly found in almost all lap-top computers.

Next we move on to Floppy disks, CD/DVDs, and Microfilm, These will be bunched together as they are more uniformly familiar to most people. Floppy disks are a out-dated and fairly unreliable way to store information they are made of a thin Mylar coted with a magnetic substance, and work much like a hard drive with minimal storage capacity (If you even touch one of the disks it will no longer work.). To replace the floppy came the CD and the DVD the technologies behind these two mediums are similar. They both use a plastic disk with a metallic coating then burn information into them. Although the physical working of these two devices is the same the formatting of the disk and the storage capabilities are very different. Then there is Microfilm mostly used for archiving it lasts forever but is not a digital medium and it ectntualy is just a roll of film that you put into a reader and it will low the image up on a screen. Typically these are found in library and museums.

Lastly we have flash drives, SD cards, thumb drives, whatever you want to call them the technology behind them is all the same. These are all solid state devices where the information is stored digitally, they have increasingly fast read/write speed and are fordable storage mediums with storage capabilities upwards of 132GB and this will only go up as technologies advances.