Primary and Secondary Memory
Primary and Secondary Memory
• Hard disks.
• Floppy disks.
• CD ROMs.
• DVDs.
• Pen drives.
• Blue Ray Disks.
Magnetic Tapes
• Magnetic tapes Magnetic tape has been used for data storage for over
50 years. When storing large amounts of data, tape can
be substantially less expensive than disk or other data
storage options.
This medium consisting of a thin tape with a coating of a
fine magnetic material, used for recording analogue or digital data.
A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape is a
tape drive. The capacity of tape media are generally on
the same order as hard disk drives (The largest being
about 5 Terabytes in 2011).
Magnetic Tapes Generally transfer data a bit slower than
hard drives, however magnetic tapes are cheaper and
are more durable
Drawbacks Of Magnetic Tapes
• Writing and retrieving data is slow.
It uses serial access for reading and writing.
• Application
Magnetic tapes are used for application which
requires extremely large storage capacity where speed
of access is not an issue.
It is commonly used for backups of file servers
for computer networks, in a variety of batch
processing applications such as reading of bank
cheques, payroll processing and general stock control.
Floppy Disk
• Floppy Disks were an were a ubiquitous form of data
storage between 1980's and early 2000's,
Floppy disks comes in 3 sizes: 8-inches, 5.5-inches and 3.5
inches. The capacities of Floppy disks vary between 1-2.50
Megabytes and these devices were very slow, reading
data at rates of bytes and kbytes/second. However,
most are very small and portable.
• Application Any use where small files such as word processing,
small spreadsheets and databases need to be moved
from one computer to another.
Useful to backup small data files.
Floppy Disk
• A soft magnetic disk. It is called floppy because it
flops if you wave it (at least, the 5-inch variety
does). Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often
called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because
you can remove them from a disk drive. Disk drives
for floppy disks are called floppy drives. Floppy disks
are slower to access than hard disks and have
less storage capacity, but they are much less
expensive. And most importantly, they are portable.
Types of Floppies
• Floppies come in three basic sizes:
• 8-inch:The first floppy disk design, invented by IBM in the late 1960s and
used in the early 1970s as first a read-only format and then as a read-write
format. The typical desktop/laptop computer does not use the 8-inch floppy
disk.
• 5-inch: The common size for PCs made before 1987 and the predecessor to
the 8-inch floppy disk. This type of floppy is generally capable
of storing between 100K and 1.2MB (megabytes) of data. The most common
sizes are 360K and 1.2MB.
• 3-inch: Floppy is something of a misnomer for these disks, as they are
encased in a rigid envelope. Despite their small size, microfloppies have a
larger storage capacity than their cousins -- from 400K to 1.4MB of data. The
most common sizes for PCs are 720K (double-density) and 1.44MB (high-
density Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K, and 1.2MB.
Floppies
Fixed hard discs
• A hard disk drive is the device used to store large
amounts of digital information in computers.
Hard disk drives are used to store operating
systems, software, video, music and working data.
These are suitable for any application which
requires very fast access to data for both reading
and writing to.
Almost all computers used a fixed hard disc. Used
for online and real time processes requiring direct access.
Used in file servers for computer networks to store
large amount of data.
Fixed Hard Disk
• It is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic
data storage device.
A hard drive is made up of platters which stored
the data, and read/write heads to transfer data.
A Hard Drive is generally the fastest of the
secondary storage devices, and has the largest data
storage capacity, approximately the same as Magnetic Tapes.
Hard drives however, are not very portable and
are primarily used internally in a computer system.
Some persons use hard drives externally as a form
of storage and as a substitute for portable storage,
hard drives used for these purposes are called external hard drives
Working of Hard Disk
• The smallest unit that can be accessed on a disk. When a disk undergoes a low-
level format, it is divided into tracks and sectors. The tracks are concentric circles
around the disk and the sectors are segments within each circle. For example, a
formatted disk might have 40 tracks, with each track divided into 10 sectors. The
operating system and disk drive keep tabs on where information is stored on the
disk by noting its track and sector number. Modern hard disk drives use a
technique called zoned-bit recording in which tracks on the outside of the disk
contain more sectors than those on the inside.
• A sector that cannot be used due to a physical flaw on the disk is called a bad
sector.
• The concept of cylinders is important, since cross-platter information in the same
cylinder can be accessed without having to move the heads. The sector is a disk’s
smallest accessible unit. Drives use a technique called zoned-bit recording in
which tracks on the outside of the disk contain more sectors than those on the
inside.
Hard Disk
Portable hard discs
• Portable hard discs are good fun because you
can carry data about all over the place and
transfer information, programs, pictures, etc
between computers.
This hardware can be connected with laptop,
notebook and pc using USB port.
Plug and play enable the device more flexible to
the user. We can carry any where else due to its smaller
size, price and capacity.
Advantages of Portable Hard Discs.
• Advantages:
• Greatly improved data cargo carrying capacity (relative to the 1.44
Mb floppy disc).
• You don't need to worry about the other person having the same
type of special cartridge drive as yourself.
• Disadvantages:
– • Hard drives have to be handled quite carefully, and when being
transported should be wrapped in something soft and put in a padded
bag.
– • More expensive than other forms of removable media.
– Application :- Portable disc discs are used to store very large files which
need transporting from one computer to another and price is not an issue.
Optical Backing Storage Media
• Optical backing storage media such as CDs and
DVDs Optical disk is an electronic data storage
medium from which data is read and written to by
using a low-powered laser beam. It is flat, circular,
plastic or glass disk on which data is stored in the
form of light and dark pits. There are three basic
types of optical disks: Read-only optical disks, Write
once read many Optical disks and Rewritable
Optical disks. Two main types of optical disks are:
CD and DVD
CD’s and DVD’s
• CDs tend to be used for large files (but smaller than 1Gb) which are
too big for a floppy disc to hold such as music and general animation.
• CD ROM/DVD ROM Applications which require the prevention of
deletion of data, accidental or otherwise.
• CD R/DVD R Applications which require a single ‘burning’ of data, e.g.
CDs - recording of music downloads from the Internet, recording of
music from MP3 format, recording of data for archiving or backup
purposes. DVDs – recording of film movies and television programs.
• CD RW/DVD RW Applications which require the updating of
information and ability to record over old data. Not suitable for music
recording but is very useful for keeping generations of files. DVDs
have between five and ten times the capacity of CDs.
DVD
• DVD is an abbreviation of Digital Versatile Disc, and is
an optical disc storage media format that can be used
for data storage. The DVD supports disks with capacities
of 4.7 GB to 17 GB and access rates of 600 KBps to 1.3
MBps. A standard DVD disc store up to 4.7 GB of data.
There are two types of DVD's: DVD-ROM and DVD-RW.
DVD-ROM are stands for DVD-Read Only Memory and
they function the same way Read Only Memory Does.
DVD-RW Stards for DVD-Rewritable, these disks can be
erased and rewritten at any time.
Pen Drive
• Flash Drive – Pen drive A flash drive is a small external
storage device, typically the size of a human thumb that
consists of flash memory. USB flash drives are removable
and rewritable reads and writes to flash memory. They
are a solid-state storage medium that's both inexpensive
and durable. Currently, USB 2.0 flash drives on the
market are able to reach a data transfer speed of 480
Mbit/s USB 3.0 has transmission speeds of up to 5 Gbit/s.
USB Flash drives vary in sizes from 128 Megabytes to 64
Gigabytes. More commonly used sizes vary from 2
Gigabytes -16 Gigabytes.
Flash Memory Cards
• Flash Memory cards Flash memory is a EEPROM
non-volatile computer storage chip. These Memory
cards currently vary in sizes between 1 Gigabytes
-16 Gigabytes and they transfer data at a rate of
approximately 14.65 MB/s. Inexpensive and
durable, and are very small. It have a size of about 1
inch * 0.75 inch with a thickness of about 2mm.
Flash memory cards also have a smaller version
which is used within cell phones, digital camera,
Tablet Pc etc.,
Cartridge
• A removable storage medium (tape, disk,
or memory chip). Some printers have slots in which you
can insert cartridges to load different fonts. A font
loaded from a cartridge is called a font
cartridge or cartridge font. The term removable
cartridge usually refers to a type of hard disk that you
can remove. Removable cartridges offer the speed of
/hard disks along with the portability of floppy disks.
• For laser and ink-jet printers, a toner cartridge is a metal
container that holds the toner.
Cache Memory
• Pronounced cash, a special high-
speed storage mechanism. Cache can be
either a reserved section of main memory or
an independent high-speed storage device.
Two types of caching are commonly used
in personal computers: memory
caching and disk caching.
Memory Caching