Objectives

Students will be able to:

  • describe the principles of operation of a variety of storage devices including those using optical, magnetic and solid state technology.
  • calculate the storage requirements of a file

Memory, Storage and Media

Starter activity - what do you know?

Look at the image above. There are 9 storage devices numbered from 1-9.

Can you decide which numbers should be placed in each of the different sections of the document?

For some sections, there may be more than one answer.

If you don't know the answer, guess!

Option

Download the image and print it out. Then you can annotate it with a team and share your ideas!

When you are considering where to store your data, you have many options.

For example, a USB Stick is so conventient. It is easy to carry around, has very good capacity and is quite cheap. However, it is easy to lose!

Some things to consider when you are choosing a storage medium are:

  • cost - how expensive is it?
  • capacity - how muchh data can it store?
  • data transfer speed - what rate can data be transferred to and from the storage medium?
  • durability - how easy is it to damage the storage medium or how easy is it to lose data?
  • portability - how easily can the storage medium be transferred from one location to another
  • rewriteability - how many times can we rewrite data to the medium?

Here are some other common storage media which use different technologies to allow storage to happen. The newest one is solid state technology. The oldest one is magnetic technology.

What do you think offline storage means?

RAM

ROM

Hard Disk Drive

Solid State Drive

DVD

CD

USB stick

Blu Ray disk

SD card

Removeable HDD

Food For Thought

Different computers use different technology for storing and accessing data. Magnetic storage eg Hard Disk Drives are still extremely common. However, if you buy the latest laptop (which will be expensive), you are getting the latest technology too - Solid State Drives. These perform very quickly allowing you to load programs very quickly on your computer, and allowing you to save data quickly too. This is great if you are a graphic designer or are working with large amounts of data.

Offline storage simply means that the storage device can be detatched from your computer. So, your hard-disk drive is not considered to be offline storage!

Past Paper Questions

Tags

CD SSD SD card DVD HDD cost Blu Ray optical capacity offline magnetic storage USB stick solid state