Secondary storage devices

BY AHMAD KHURRAM
9C-BROWN
 What are Secondary storage devices?

Secondary storage devices are non volatile storage

devices that are not directly addressable by the CPU.
They can contain more data than primary memory
but the data access time is a lot longer.
 Three categories of secondary devices

Secondary storage devices can me divided into three

types
Magnetic
Solid State
Optical
 Magnetic Storage: Hard Disk Drives

 These are the most common type of storage device

 Data is stored on the sectors and tracks. These tracks and sectors make up a
platter
 HDDs have a number of platters that spin 7000 times a second while read write
heads read and write data to the platters.
 One problem with HDDs is that it can take a lot of time for data to be located
causing latency issues
 This can be solved by using defragmentation software tidy up the disk sectors
Solid state drives: Floating and control gates

 Floating and control gates use CMOS and NAND technology

 Dielectric coating separates the transistors. The electron in the electron source
become attracted to the control gate but stays in the floating gate.
 Because of this we have control over the bit value.
 This is relatively more reliable than HDDs as it has no moving parts
 It is also lighter than HDDs
 Optical media: CD/DVDs disks

 Red laser light is used to read and write data from the surface of the disk
 It has spiral tracks.
 Data is stored on ‘pits’ and ‘lands’ on the spiral tracks
 When the disc spins, the laser beam ‘contacts’ the disk, it follows the spiral
path’ reading all the data.

 DVDs are slightly different than CDs.

 They use a shorter wavelength of laser and are dual layered so they van store
more data than CDs
 Optical media: Blu-ray discs

 Blu-ray discs are very similar to CDs and DVDs

 Rather than a red laser they use a blue laser that has a shorter wave length so
they can store more data.
 The pits and lands on the Blu-ray discs are smaller so more data can be stored
 Data transfer rate is also faster in Blu-ray discs than in DVDs and CDs