Hard Disk Drives (HDD) - Fixed Disk

• uses magnetic storage as a storage medium
• allows defragmentation
• typically used as secondary memory

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Solid State Drives (SSD)

• uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently (typically NAND Flash Memory as the storage medium)
• defragmentation not needed
• has a controller to manage random-access-memory
• typically used as secondary memory

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Hybrid Hard Drives (HHD)

• combines the high capacity of a traditional mechanical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with the high speeds of a Solid-State Drive (SSD) into a single device

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USB Flash Drives

• uses NAND Flash Memory

Secure Digital (SD) Card

• uses NAND Flash Memory as a storage medium
• has no controller to manage random-access-memory

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MultiMediaCard (MMC) Card

• uses NAND Flash Memory

Compact Disk (CD)

• uses optical storage
• disks feature microscopic pits and bumps that are read by a laser
• max storage capacity: 700MB
• types: CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW

Digital Video/Versatile Disc (DVD)

• uses optical storage
• more compact than CD, and is read by a finer laser
• max storage capacity: 4.7 GB, DVD-DL can store up to 8.5 GB
• types: DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD-DL

Blue Ray

• uses optical storage
• more compact than DVD
• capacity anywhere from 25 GB to 128 GB although the most popular capacity sizes are 25GB (single layer) or 50GB (double layer)

Floppy Drives

• uses magnetic disk

Storage Area Network (SAN)

• is a dedicated storage network that provides block-level access to LUNs
  • a LUN, or logical unit number, is a virtual disk provided by the SAN
  • the system administrator has the same access and rights to the LUN as if it were a disk directly attached to it
  • the system administrator can partition and format the disk by any means he or she chooses

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Network Attached Storage (NAS)

• uses an existing network to allow access to shared disks
• this is filesystem-level access
• the system administrator does not have the ability to partition or format the disks since they are potentially shared by multiple computers.
• this technology is commonly used to provide multiple workstations access to the same data

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