COMPUTER STORAGE DEVICES

Types of storage devices

Floppy Drive - The smallest and most portable of all the storage devices usually holds about 1.44 MB of storage. Use a floppy disk media.

Super Drive
The LS120 or SuperDisk is a drive which supports a special floppy diskette which can store up to 120MB or 240MB of information as well as being backwards compatible and still supporting the standard floppy diskettes.

Zip Drive
New generation similar to the floppy disk drive created by Iomega The Iomega Zip Drive was first released 1994 and today is becoming a popular solution for PC and Macintosh computers as a removable solution. Zip Drives Disks come in 100MB, 250MB and 750MB

CD Burner An optical storage device that holds data anywhere from 650MB to 700MB (74-80 minutes)

Dvd Burner - A newer optical storage device that holds data anywhere from 4.70-17.08GB

DVD Capacity

DVD-5 4.7GB (2 hours)
DVD-9 8.54GB (4 hours)
DVD-10 9.4GB (4.5 hours)
DVD-18 17.08GB (8 hours)

Newest DVD format

Blu-Ray DVD 25-50GB
HD-DVD 15-30GB

Hard Drive - A hard drive is usually built inside your computer and holds anywhere from 1GB to 4TB of capacity. There are three types of internal hard drives are PATA, SATA and SCSI. External hard drives comes in USB, Firewire, SATA and SCSI.

Flash Drive - A compact and portable device use for storing data anywhere from 128MB up to 4GB.




Tape Drives

Tape drives allow large companies as well as end users to backup large amounts of data. Tape drives are capable of backing up a couple hundred megabytes to several gigabytes of information without having to spend large sums of money on disks.

Tape Drive Standards

8mm Tape Drive - Manufactured and available through Exabyte 8mm tapes are similar to what are used in camcorder. 8mm tapes are a faster solution then the DAT and transfer up to 6M/Sec. While the tapes are similar to camcorder tapes it is recommended that to backup information you use 8mm tapes designed for your drive.

DAT (Digital Audio Tape) - Digital Audio Tape is primarily developed and marketed by Hewlett-Packard. DAT drives use two types of data formats DDS (Digital Data Storage) and DataDAT. DDS Drives are available in three types DDS-1/2/3. (36-72GB)

DLT (Digital Linear Tape) - DLT drives are a robust and durable medium. The DLT segments the tape into parallel horizontal tracks and records data by streaming the tape across a single stationary head. Released in 1991 DLT drives are very reliable, high-speed, and high-capacity making the DLT drives an excellent use for Network backups. (330-600GB)

AIT - Advance Intelligent Tapes (100-260GB)

Travan- (8GB-20GB)

LTO-Linear Tape Open (200-400GB)
Advance Storage

NAS -Network Attachment Storage

SAN- Storage Area Network