Secondary Storage

Question 1

What is Optical Storage?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is Magnetic Storage?

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

What is Solid State Storage?

Answer 3

This is made of microchips (switches).

The state of the switches determine if a 1, or 0 is stored.

Question 4

Why do we need Secondary Storage?

Answer 4

• To access it again later
• To use software
• To interact with the computer

Question 5

What would happen without Secondary Storage?

Answer 5

• Software would need to be installed each time we use it

- You couldn’t save any files, data, images, videos etc.

Question 6

What is it important to look at when buying a storage device?

Answer 6

• Capacity
• Storage
• Portability
• Durability
• Cost

Question 7

What is Cache and what does it do?

Answer 7

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.