Types of flash storage:

USB pen drives and memory cards(e.g. SD cards) are also flash-based, solid-state storage.

They’re much slower than SSDs and have a much shorter read/write life.

They’re used to expand the storage capacity for small devices like cameras, smartphones and tablets (which are way too small for SSDs and HDDs). Their capacity is very high relative to their tiny size.

Optical discs are cheap and robust secondary storage:

Optical discs like: CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

CDs can hold around 700MB of data, DVDs can hold around 4.7 GB and Blu-Rays can hold around 25 GB

Optical discs come in three forms:

• Read only
• Write only
• Rewritable

Nowadays their use in declining:

Things like Netflix, Steam, iTunes are much more better for use, removing the total usage of optical discs. Modern devices like tablets don’t have optical drives!!

They can’t compete with flash storage devices due to their low capacity per disc, very slow read/write and poor reliability of RW discs.

They do have some advantages – They are very cheap  per GB, portable and reliable as it won’t get damaged by water and is shock proof  (although they easily get scratched).

Magnetic Tapes are used for Archiving:

Magnetic tape has great storage capacity than HDDs . It also has an extremely low cost per GB.

Magnetic tapes are often used by large organisations in archive libraries to store huge amounts of data.

It comes in a special cassette. That require a special type of tape-drive for read/writing.

Tape is written sequentially. So you can only write it from the beginning to the end.

It is going to be very slow in finding a specific data stored inside it, but has a fast read/write speed once in the correct place to read/write.

By Anshjeet Singh