Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Mass storage

 
Sci-Tech Dictionary: mass storage
(′mas ′stör·ij)

(computer science) A computer storage with large capacity, especially one whose contents are directly accessible to a computer's central processing unit.


Search unanswered questions...
Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Permanent peripheral storage such as disks and tapes. Contrast with "temporary memory." The "mass" is used for emphasis, as "storage" is sufficient. At one time, it meant very large storage; however, the term is also used to refer to USB drives, which have very small capacities compared to disk. See magnetic disk, optical disc and magnetic tape.

Mass Storage on a Deck of Cards
In the 1960s, a roomful of these Card Random Access Memory (CRAM) units provided 176 megabytes of direct access mass storage, a huge capacity for that era. See CRAM for more details. (Image courtesy of NCR Corporation.)

Download Computer Desktop Encyclopedia to your iPhone/iTouch

Dental Dictionary: mass storage
Top

n

A storage medium in which data may be organized and maintained both sequentially and nonsequentially. Usually used for storage of files.

Wikipedia: Mass storage
Top

In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. Storage media for mass storage include hard disks, floppy disks, flash memory, optical discs, magneto-optical discs, magnetic tape, drum memory, punched tape (mostly historic) and holographic memory (experimental). Mass storage includes devices with removable and non-removable media. It does not include random access memory (RAM), which is volatile in that it loses its contents after power loss. The word "mass" is largely semantic however, the term is used to refer to storage devices of any size (such as USB drives, which tend to have smaller capacities compared to hard disk).[1]

Mass storage devices are characterized by:

  • Sustainable transfer speed
  • Seek time
  • Cost
  • Capacity

Today, magnetic disks are the predominant storage media in personal computers. Optical discs, however, are almost exclusively used in the large-scale distribution of retail software, music and movies because of the cost and manufacturing efficiency of the moulding process used to produce DVD and compact discs and the nearly-universal presence of reader drives in personal computers and consumer appliances.[2] Flash memory (in particular, NAND flash) has an established and growing niche in high performance enterprise computing installations, removable storage and on portable devices such as notebook computers and cell phones because of its portability and low power consumption.[3][4]

The design of computer architectures and operating systems are often dictated by the mass storage and bus technology of their time.[5] Desktop operating systems such as Windows are now so closely tied to the performance characteristics of magnetic disks that it is difficult to deploy them on other media like flash memory without running into space constraints, suffering serious performance problems or breaking applications.

Usage

Mass storage devices used in desktop and most server computers typically have their data organized in a file system. The choice of file system is often important in maximizing the performance of the device: general purpose file systems (such as NTFS and HFS, for example) tend to do poorly on slow-seeking optical storage such as compact discs.

Some relational databases can also be deployed on mass storage devices without an intermediate file system or storage manager. Oracle and MySQL, for example, can store table data directly on raw block devices.

On removable media, archive formats (such as tar archives on magnetic tape, which pack file data end-to-end) are sometimes used instead of file systems because they are more portable and simpler to stream.

On embedded computers, it is common to memory map the contents of a mass storage device (usually ROM or flash memory) so that its contents can be traversed as in-memory data structures or executed directly by programs.

References

  1. ^ "Mass Storage: Definition from Answers.com". Accessed on July 23, 2009
  2. ^ Taylor, Jim. "DVD FAQ". http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.1. Retrieved 2007-07-08. "In 2003, six years after introduction, there were over 250 million DVD playback devices worldwide, counting DVD players, DVD PCs, and DVD game consoles." 
  3. ^ Gonsalves, Antone (23 May 2007), "Micron predicts flash memory will replace disk drives", EETimes, http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199701290 .
  4. ^ "Flash Drives: Always on the Go, Without Moving Parts". New York Times. 2005-02-17. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/technology/circuits/17howw.html. Retrieved 2008-02-24. .
  5. ^ Patterson, Dave (June 2003), "A Conversation With Jim Gray" ([dead link]Scholar search), ACM Queue 1 (4), http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=printer_friendly&pid=43&page=1 . (A discussion of recent trents in mass storage.)

See also


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Sci-Tech Dictionary. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms. Copyright © 2003, 1994, 1989, 1984, 1978, 1976, 1974 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Computer Desktop Encyclopedia. THIS COPYRIGHTED DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY.
All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.
© 1981-2009 Computer Language Company Inc.  All rights reserved.  Read more
Dental Dictionary. Mosby's Dental Dictionary. Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mass storage" Read more

 

Mentioned in