Computer Storage Devices

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Computer Storage Devices Storage devices are used in order to store various items such as programs, data and instructions. Storage was used as early as 1804 by hole punching paper cards in order to control machinery. Without storage, the computer programs and files that exist now would not be possible. There are many different devices used for storage today such as hard drives, floppy drives and CD-Rom drives.

Hard drives come in all computers and are the main storage device. An average hard drive usually stores from four to fifty gigabytes, but there are hard drives with much greater capacities available. A hard drive works by using multiple platters which are made of glass, aluminum or ceramic which has been coated with a magnetic material. The data is recorded by arranging the magnetic particles in order to form bytes on the disk.

Floppy drives are another type of storage unit in which the information is stored on a separate removable disk.

There are two different types of floppy drives: a 3.5 inch and a 5.25 inch. The number refers to the size of the disk that is used in that particular drive. A 3.5 inch floppy drive can store 1.44 megabytes and a 5.25 floppy can store 1.2 megabytes. Imation has developed a superdisk drive which has a capacity of 120 or 200 megabytes which is backwards compatible with the 3.5 inch floppy.

The third type of storage that I am going to talk about is a CD-Rom (Compact Disk) drive which also uses a removable disk in order to store data. A CD-Rom works by using a laser lens in order to burn pits into the surface of the CD. The surface of the disk, called land, reflects light back to the lens which is read as 1.