1.3: Storage - YK

Question 1

What are some characteristics of magnetic storage?

Answer 1

Uses a laser on a magnet to make a magnetised segment. Includes hard disk drives and floppy disks.
Capacity: High (typically 1/2 - 2 TB)
Access Speed: Floppy disks + tape drives slow, HDDs quite fast
Portability: Not very portable (large, can be heavy)
Durability: Has moving parts so not very durable
Reliability: Very reliable (lasts a long time)

Question 2

What are some characteristics of optical storage?

Answer 2

Uses lasers to burn marks in a reflective disc. Includes CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, Blu-Ray ROM.
Capacity: Low (typically 700MB or about 5GB)
Access Speed: Quite slow
Portability: Very portable (light, quite small)
Durability: Very fragile (moving parts)
Reliability: Not very reliable (limited re-writability)

Question 3

What are some characteristics of solid state (flash) storage?

Answer 3

Uses electricity to open+close gates on a circuit board. Includes USB memory sticks, SD cards, and SSDs.
Capacity: Medium (typically 32GB but can be much more or less)
Access Speed: Very fast
Portability: Very portable (small and light), but not SSDs
Durability: Very durable (no moving parts)
Reliability: Limited number of degrading read-write cycles

Question 4

What order do the units of data go in?

Answer 4

Bit (1/8 byte), Nibble (1/2 byte), Byte, Kilobyte (KB), Megabyte (MB), Gigabyte (GB), Terabyte (TB), Petabyte (PB)