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There are a number of different computer storage devices such as flash drives, external hard drives,
smart cards, re-writable CD's, and even online storage sites. Floppy and ZIP disks are rarely used
and will not be covered in this fact sheet.


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1. Also known as thumb drives (because of their size) or USB drives (because of the
port they connect to), flash drives are the premiere way to store data in a compact
and portable fashion. Flash drives range in data capacity from 64 megabytes of 64
gigabytes.

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2. External hard drives are exactly like the hard drive on any computer, except they are
outside of your computer. They usually connect through a USB port (similar to flash
drives), are designed either for desktops or laptops and have a storage capacity of
up to 700 gigabytes.

 


3. Smart cards are also known as memory cards. The usage and types of smart cards
have evolved over the years from primary usage in laptops to cell phones and
Personal Digital Assistants (PDA's).

 

4. Also called 'remote backup', online storage sites allow you to store information on
their servers. A list of online storage sites are provided in the 'resources' list.

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5. These are devices that look exactly like a CD, except you can store information on
them. They are often used to store music, text files, photos, and other data.

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A computer storage device is any type of hardware that stores data. The most common
type of storage device, which nearly all computers have, is a hard drive. The computer's
primary hard drive stores the operating system, applications, and files and folders for
users of the computer.While the hard drive is the most ubiquitous of all storage devices,
several other types are common as well .Knowing what kinds of storage devices are
available can keep you from using up too much space on your computer's hard drive.
They can also help keep your computer's hard drive from crashing, along with keeping it
running at top speed.
The most common storage devices are:
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- They are plastic square disks, usually with a silver or black sliding piece
going across the top. These disks come in a variety of colors and they hold about 144
million bytes. (Bytes are characters, symbols and letters).
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- They look like a floppy disk, but they are a little thicker. This disk also comes
in a variety of colors and holds about 200 MB of data.

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ppp
(Compact Disc Rewriteable) - Thiese discs looks like a regular CD. The
only difference is that you can write or record on this disc and erase it as many times as
you want. It works just like a floppy disk or a zip disk.
pp 650 MB.p
ppp
p 4.7 GB
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25 GB per-layer optical disc, dual layer discs (50 GB)
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the hard drive. It can be inserted and removed just like a floppy disk. It holds about
similar amount of space as built in Hardrives but use a relative slower transfer rate by
using USB 2.0 .
"# # pp - This one is a service on the Internet that provides storage space
to computer users. This service offers about 25 MB of space, but it could be more,
depending on the service type.
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$p - This a storage device that comes in many colors and has a stick shape to
it. They are very small in size, but they can hold anywhere between 256 MB and 32 GB
of material on them. They use USB 2.0 version with

%p - This is a thin credit card size device that fits into a PC card slot, usually on a
notebook computer. This card simply adds storage to most notebooks.
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- These are the size of an ATM card. When inserted into a smart card
reader, they can read and update data for you.
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p& - This one is a magnetically coated ribbon of plastic, capable of storing
large amounts of data at a very low cost. Usually, storage tapes are a little bigger than
audio tapes. Older computers used tape and tape drives, but even today, some people
still back their systems up with storage tape. These tapes hold between 20 GB to about
110 GB of data. An external tape drive can be purchased separately as well, but those
are even harder to find.
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digital cameras.
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p   - This is a rectangular shaped disk that is used mostly with digital
cameras and notebook computers. They hold approximately 128 MB as well.e.g the
Sony`s Memory Stick Duo
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p  - This is a square disk or 2 x 3 cm that has capacity commonly ranging
from 256mb to 32 GB and is used with digital cameras and handheld computers ,
mobile phones
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- This is a square disk that has 2 MB to about 128 MB of space on it.
It¶s used with digital cameras, handheld computers and photo printers.
There you go! These are just some of the storage devices that are available today. So,
the next time you want to save something that takes up a large amount of space on
your hard drive, think twice about it and consider using one of these storage devices
instead. One of these devices could save you a lot of space on your hard drive and
keep your system running at its best.
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A secondary or tertiary storage may connect to a computer utilizing computer networks.

This concept does not pertain to the primary storage, which is shared between multiple
processors in a much lesser degree.

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 (DAS) is a traditional mass storage,that does not use any
network. This is still a most popular approach. This term was coined lately, together with
NAS and SAN.

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 (NAS) is mass storage attached to a computer which
another computer can access at file level over a local area network, a private wide area
network, or in the case of online file storage, over the Internet. NAS is commonly
associated with the NFS and CIFS/SMB protocols.

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 (SAN) is a specialized network, which provides other computers

with storage capacity. The crucial difference between NAS and SAN is the former
presents and manages file systems to client computers, whilst the latter provides
access at block-addressing (raw) level, leaving it to attaching systems to manage data
or file systems within the provided capacity. SAN is commonly associated with Fiber
Channel networks.



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Large quantities of individual magnetic tapes, and optical or magneto-optical discs may
be stored in robotic tertiary storage devices. In tape storage field they are known as
tape libraries, and in optical storage field optical jukeboxes, or optical disk libraries per
analogy. Smallest forms of either technology containing just one drive device are
referred to as autoloaders or autochangers.

Robotic-access storage devices may have a number of slots, each holding individual
media, and usually one or more picking robots that traverse the slots and load media to
built-in drives. The arrangement of the slots and picking devices affects performance.
Important characteristics of such storage are possible expansion options: adding slots,
modules, drives, robots. Tape libraries may have from 10 to more than 100,000 slots,
and provide terabytes or petabytes of near-line information. Optical jukeboxes are
somewhat smaller solutions, up to 1,000 slots.

Robotic storage is used for backups, and for high-capacity archives in imaging, medical,
and video industries. Hierarchical storage management is a most known archiving
strategy of automatically ÷
 
long-unused files from fast hard disk storage to
libraries or jukeboxes. If the files are needed, they are   back to disk.