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Data Storage Devices
Data storage devices are any piece of computer hardware used to record some sort of information. Questions about storage devices and the media on which they record information belong here.
1,624 Questions
Is a DVD a magnetic storage or a optical storage?
optical memory: it is a memry device that uses laser beams ro store data . for e.g. CDROM.
magnetic memory: it is a memory device that uses magnetic tape to store data . for e.g. hard disk
optical memory are advanced and faster than magnetic memory device..
Most floppy disks will come pre-formatted. All floppy disks need to be formatted to be usable.
How do you clear an SD Digital card once you have transferred your photos to the computer?
your computer will ask you if you want to delete the pictures. or if you/ve already put them on the computer, you can delete them manually by scrolling through and deleting them one by one.
What are examples of serial storage devices?
Serial port generally refers to Serial ATA port. These Serial ATA ports are better known as "SATA" ports. You will find them on Hard Drives and Solid State Drives specifically. But you may also find them on peripherals such as card readers for Flash media and Optical Drives. SATA is categorized into 3 categories SATA, SATA II and SATA III. The Function of SATA is to transfer data. Previous to SATA, Computers used "IDE" service which was far slower and more expensive to manufacture than SATA.
What are Holographic storage disadvantage?
A disadvantage of electronic data storage might include the fact that the data cannot be retrieved on a variety of platforms or without an internet connection. Other disadvantages include the security of electronic data that may be hacked or stolen.
How many gigabites in an average computer?
The amount of RAM a computer can have is limited by the motherboard (something like 12 GB is reasonable), and the hard drive space is limited by how large they make them (something around 1,500 GB per connection available on the motherboard is reasonable)
How do you recover lost system restore points?
You can't. If they are still on the computer, you can open system restore and click "Choose a different restore point". Then click next, and in the bottom left hand corner of the windows, click "Show more restore points". If that doesn't work, they are gone. The OS will automatically delete old restore points.
Is zip disc drive output device?
A zip disc is a storage device similar to a floppy. The media is pricey, though, so i would suggest you use CD-R/W instead of zip.
What is the difference between floppy disc and hard drive?
A hard disk (HD for short) and floppy disk (FD for short) both work in the same manner, except that on can hold more information. Both are a type of magnetic media which can have information written and erased many many times. A lot better than paper when you write something and erase many times, that paper gets thin, then GAME OVER! I am including a link to better explain this from "howstuffworks". I really love that site. I could spend all day on there reading about anything! About their differences. the most common floppy disks only hold about 3.14MB of data. Where an electric HD can hold almost any amount up to several terabytes today!! That is huge. The FD uses a mechanical motor to move the read/write armature that hovers over the FD material (most comparable to cassette tape material). This is where it changes the magnetic properties of the tape material, and bingo, last night's report is saved! The HD works in a similar fashion. HD's have dense metallic disks inside that can spin at thousands of RPM's (rounds per minute). As the disks spin a similar Armature that is is surrounded by some really powerful magnets changes the magnetic properties of the dense metallic disks and Bingo, last night's report, music, and the whole operating system is spinning virtually forever. That is the basics. Hopefully that sums things up in a nutshell. Visit that site at howstuffworks to really see a more in depth look at floppy disks & hard drives!
What has the lowest storage capacity?
Is it really the ' DVD' ? I have something says it's the DVD.
but it seems to me the 'Floopy disk', don't you think?
Can you connect and use the CD-ROM on your PC to watch a movie on a television?
short answer: yes! you might have to buy a new video card and TV - but once you have the right hardware, you can make it work.
"not as short" answer: first, you need a computer with a CD-ROM... and of course the movie on a CD as well as the software to watch said movie.
second, you need a video card that that has a 'video out' and a TV with a 'video input'. connect the two using an rca cable - you can get one at any radio shack.
set your video card on your computer to use the video out and set your tv to show the video in.
turn up your computers volume!
you might have to reference the instructions that came with your tv or video card, but as long as you have the in and outs - it can work.
What is the difference between the storage medium used within a SATA harddrive and a SSD harddrive?
Both devices provide non-volatile storage, which means they’re capable of storing data even when a computer loses power (as opposed to something like random access memory, which requires a constant source of electricity).
Hard disk drives (HDDs) use mechanical components to store data using magnets, while solid-state drives (SSDs) store data electronically. SSDs do not contain moving parts, which is advantageous for several reasons.
To understand the benefits of each technology, we need to understand how they function. It’s fascinating stuff, but skip over this next section if you simply want to review the advantages and disadvantages of each.
How Hard Drives WorkHard drives contain one or more platters, which are discs coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. As the platters spin, the head stack assembly—similar in appearance to a turntable stylus—reads and writes data as north or south magnetic charges. These charges appear to the computer as 0’s and 1’s (a system known as binary data). Each binary digit is called a bit.
Modern hard drives can store an incredible amount of data. A 1-terabyte hard drive contains 8 trillion bits. That’s a lot of zeros, and it means the surface of a hard drive’s platters are densely packed with information.
The hard drive’s read/write heads never actually touch the magnetic material; they float on a cushion of air generated by the spin of the platters. That cushion of air is incredibly small, about 5 to 10 nanometers. To put that in perspective, a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers in diameter.
If something goes wrong, the heads could come into contact with the platters, scraping off the magnetic material and physically removing data from the hard drive. That’s called a head crash, and it’s one of the most common sources of data loss. That’s where phrases like “my computer crashed" came from.
Modern hard drives have plenty of safeguards to prevent this type of catastrophic failure. Still, because they use moving parts, every hard drive eventually fails—the spindle that moves the platters could seize, the heads could become misaligned, or the circuit board that relays data to the rest of the computer could stop working.
HDD read/write speeds are also limited by the speed of their spindles. Typical computer hard drives spin at 7,200 rotations per minute or faster, but even so, to read a certain bit, the heads must physically move over that space on the platter.
How Solid-State Drives WorkAs their name implies, solid-state drives don’t rely on moving components to store data. They consist of NAND flash memory, which uses floating gate transistors to store data with electricity.
If that sounds complicated...well, it is, but the basic function is fairly simple. Basically, the floating gates register as a “0" when they hold an electric charge and as a “1" when they don’t hold a charge. The gates are organized into smaller pages and larger blocks.
Here’s the main drawback of the technology: SSDs can’t really modify data easily. To change a file, the drive needs to make a copy of an entire block, erase the first block, then rewrite it with the new data. Erasing a block of data requires a relatively large amount of voltage, so overwriting data is a complex process, and floating gates become less reliable as they’re overwritten multiple times.
What does that mean for your data? Eventually, your SSD will become slower, and data corruption will become more common. Modern SSDs have technology to limit this effect, but that’s outside the scope of this answer—the important point to keep in mind is that every type of long-term data storage device will eventually fail, so while solid-state drives are more reliable than traditional hard drives in some respects, they’re not perfect.
Should you use a hard drive or a solid-state drive?Both storage technologies have benefits. Depending on how you use your computer, you might prefer one type of storage.
Here are some of the advantages of each option:
- Hard drives are (currently) larger and less expensive. At the time we wrote this, SSDs cost about twice as much as hard drives on a per-gigabyte basis. For the average computer user, HDDs also offer more capacity. If you’re storing a ton of files and you’ve got a limited budget, you’ll probably want a hard drive. That might change over time. The per-gigabyte price of solid-state drives has dropped in recent years and should continue to drop as more consumers adopt the technology.
- Solid-state drives are less susceptible to physical damage. Because they don’t have moving components, solid-state drives are often a better choice for laptops and external storage. Of course, other computer components are still susceptible to physical damage, so don’t take this as an excuse to throw your devices around.
- Solid-state drives are much faster. A typical SSD can read data at around 550 megabytes per second (MBps) and write at 520 MBps. A hard drive might achieve speeds of around 125 MBps. If you’re concerned with performance (for instance, if you’re building a gaming PC), a solid-state drive offers huge speed advantages.
- Solid-state drives generally use less power than hard drives. When spinning up, a hard drive can use as many as 25 watts. While writing data, most SSDs use fewer than 2 watts. That’s important if your device relies on battery power. If you’re buying a drive for a laptop and you’re concerned about battery life, an SSD might offer a significant advantage (but be sure to check the SSD’s wattage consumption before making your purchase).
- When you delete data from a solid-state drive, it’s probably gone for good. When you delete data on a hard drive, the device doesn’t overwrite your files right away; it simply marks the space occupied by the files as available, then writes over that part of the platter later. Because of how they read and write data, solid-state drives clear out the space almost immediately. In other words, if you delete a file from a hard drive using conventional methods, it will be recoverable for some time. That’s not true of SSDs. This isn’t a major concern for most computer users, but it’s an important point to keep in mind if you regularly work with sensitive data.
Regardless of which storage device you choose, you should make sure you have a decent backup plan in place. Never trust a single device with all of your important data, and try to keep some free space on your HDD or SSD to allow it to function as efficiently as possible. If your computer seems much slower than normal, or if you hear sounds coming from a hard drive, back up important files immediately and replace your storage media.
While neither technology is perfect, they’re both capable of storing incredible amounts of information, and they’re both reliable options when used properly.
Is a USB stick an output device?
A USB drive is a device that stores data and could be considered either an output or input device, though not in the sense of a monitor or speakers being an output device or a keyboard and mouse an input device. The data it contains cannot be directly accessable by the human senses in those same terms.
What is a serial access data storage?
SAM stores data as a series of memory cells that can only be accessed sequentially (like a cassette tape). If the data is not in the current location, each memory cell is checked until the needed data is found. SAM works very well for memory buffers, where the data is normally stored in the order in which it will be used (a good example is the texture buffer memory on a video card). RAM data, on the other hand, can be accessed in any order.
Does A hard disk provides much less storage capacity than a floppy disk or zip disk?
Zip disks can hold 100 megabytes. Today's hard drives usually hold 250 gigabytes, smaller ones are around 100 gigabytes, and large ones are upwards of 500 gigabytes. One gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so the typical hard drive can hold 2,500 times more than a zip disk.
To answer the question in one word, no.
hard
What are the unit of measurements of storage devices?
The units of computer storage are :
Bits, nibbles, Bytes, Kilobytes(KB), Megabytes(MB), Gigabytes(GB), Terabytes(TB), Petabytes(PB), Exabytes(EB), Zettabytes(ZB), Yottabytes(YB)....etc
What are the difference between main memory and secondary storage?
Main has the following characteristics that differentiates it from physical or secondary memory. It is volatile, expensive, small in size and fast while physical memory is permanent, large in capacity and is cheaper than main memory.
What holds more a CD a DVD a USB flash drive or a media player?
i don't know thats why i am asking you?
What is the function of the backing storage?
in order to store multimedia presentations you need backing storage there are a number of backing storage devices which are all parts of the hardware of a computer system when discussing backing storage the term access is used in this unit we will only look at backing storage which has random or direct access is when the the storage device can go to a piece of data straight awy wherever it is sold. please note copied from a book
What is the storage capacity for optical disks?
The BDXL format supports 100GB and 128GB write-once discs and 100GB rewritable discs for commercial applications. It was defined in June 2010.
How do you burn DVD on to a DVD for free?
Moovida is a great piece of software that's main funtion is a media manager and media center. It does allow you to backup DVDs. Look on their site for a tutorial.
What is the purpose of formatting a disk?
Here's a simple way to describe why we format disks: Think of an unformatted disk as a stack of blank paper. When you format the disk, you are essentially putting page numbers in sequence on all that paper, with a blank table of contents on the first sheet. Now the computer can locate each blank page. When you write to the disk, the computer adds the data to as many blank pages as needed, and makes a location reference in the table of contents. When you try to read the disk, the computer looks at the table of contents to find the right page.
