IGCSE ICT Paper 1 - Storage Devices and Media - Ajiro Tech

Secondary storage includes all non-volatile devices that are not part of primary memory. They allow data to be stored as long as required by the user. This type of storage is much larger than RAM and ROM (primary memory), but data access time is considerably longer. All applications, the operating system, device drivers and general files (for example, documents, photos and music) are stored in secondary storage. There are three different categories of secondary storage which are based on technology that uses the following media: - magnetic - optical - solid state. It is very important to distinguish between the terms storage media and storage device. Media is the hardware on which the data is actually stored (for example, a CD or a DVD); whereas the storage device is the hardware used to read from or write to the media (for example, a CD/DVD reader or writer).