Secondary Storage Flashcards
What is Optical Storage?
A laser light creates marks in a pattern on the disk. A laser light detects where the marks are and translates this into a readable format
What is Magnetic Storage?
Read/write move across the medium and change how magnetised that part of the medium is. E.g. one level of magnetism will be a 1, a second will be a 0.
What is Solid State Storage?
This is made of microchips (switches).
The state of the switches determine if a 1, or 0 is stored.
Why do we need Secondary Storage?
- To access it again later
- To use software
- To interact with the computer
What would happen without Secondary Storage?
- Software would need to be installed each time we use it
- You couldn’t save any files, data, images, videos etc.
What is it important to look at when buying a storage device?
- Capacity
- Storage
- Portability
- Durability
- Cost
What is Cache and what does it do?
Cache is the CPU’s personal storage. It makes it quicker for the CPU to collect the data from there instead of going to the RAM or secondary storage.