Mass storage

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about mass storage in general. For the
USB protocol, see USB mass storage device class
.

In

primary memory as for example with floppy disks on personal computers
.

Devices and/or systems that have been described as mass storage include

random access memory
(RAM).

There are two broad classes of mass storage: local data in devices such as

SSD and HDD.[3]

Definition

The notion of "large" amounts of data is of course highly dependent on the time frame and the market segment, as storage device capacity has increased by many orders of magnitude since the beginnings of computer technology in the late 1940s and continues to grow; however, in any time frame, common mass storage devices have tended to be much larger and at the same time much slower than common realizations of contemporaneous primary storage technology.

Papers

Fall Joint Computer Conference[7] (FJCC) used the term mass storage for devices substantially larger than contemporaneous hard disk drives. Similarly, a 1972 analysis identified mass storage systems from Ampex (Terabit Memory) using video tape, Precision Industries (Unicon 690-212) using lasers and International Video (IVC-1000) using video tape[8] and states "In the literature, the most common definition of mass storage capacity is a trillion bits.".[9] The first IEEE conference on mass storage was held in 1974[10] and at that time identified mass storage as "capacity on the order of 1012 bits" (1 gigabyte).[11] In the mid-1970s IBM used the term to in the name of the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System, which provided virtual disks backed up by Helical scan magnetic tape cartridges, slower than disk drives but with a capacity larger than was affordable with disks.[12] The term mass storage was used in the PC marketplace for devices, such as floppy disk drives, far smaller than devices that were not[a]
considered mass storage in the mainframe marketplace.

Mass storage devices are characterized by:

  • Sustainable transfer speed
  • Seek time
  • Cost
  • Capacity

Storage media

Magnetic disks are the predominant storage media in

cell phones.[14][15]

The design of

bus technology of their time.[16]

Usage

Mass storage devices used in desktop and most server computers typically have their data organized in a file system. The choice of file system is often important in maximizing the performance of the device: general purpose file systems (such as NTFS and HFS, for example) tend to do poorly on slow-seeking optical storage such as compact discs.

Some

block devices
.

On

magnetic tape, which pack file data end-to-end) are sometimes used instead of file systems because they are more portable and simpler to stream
.

On embedded computers, it is common to memory map the contents of a mass storage device (usually ROM or flash memory) so that its contents can be traversed as in-memory data structures or executed directly by programs.

See also

  • Data storage
    for general overview of storage methods

Notes

  1. IBM 350
    stored 5 million six-bit characters, larger than contemporary 1.44 and 2.88 MB floppies.

References

  1. PC Magazine. Ziff Davis. Archived
    from the original on 2016-07-05. Retrieved 2019-10-10.
  2. ISBN 978-0-12-420158-3
    .
  3. ^ https://www.hyperstone.com/en/NAND-Flash-is-displacing-hard-disk-drives-1249,12728.html, NAND Flash is displacing Hard Disk Drives, Retrieved 29. May 2018
  4. ^ 1966FJCC, pp. 711–742, TECHNOLOGIES AND SYSTEMS FOR ULTRA-HIGH CAPACITY STORAGE.
  5. ^ 1966FJCC, pp. 711–716, UNICON Computer Mass Memory System, C.H.BECKER.
  6. ^ 1966FJCC, pp. 735–742, A Photo-Digital Mass Storage System, J. D. KUEHLER, H. R. KERBY.
  7. ^ Unknown (1966). 1966 Fall Joint Computer Conference. AFIPS Conference Proceedings. Vol. 29. Spartan Books.
    ISBN 978-1-4503-7893-2
    . 1966FJCC.
  8. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.859.1517
    . NPS-55SS72071A.
  9. ^ NPS-55SS72071A, p. 6, A. Definition and Uses of Mass Storage.
  10. ^ The 35th conference was held in 2019.
  11. S2CID 29301138
    . Retrieved December 3, 2020.
  12. ^ Introduction to the IBM 3850 Mass Storage System (MSS) (PDF) (Second ed.). IBM. November 1974. GA32-0028-1.
  13. ^ Taylor, Jim. "DVD FAQ". Archived from the original on 2009-08-22. Retrieved 2007-07-08. In 2003, six years after introduction, there were over 250 million DVD playback devices worldwide, counting DVD players, DVD PCs, and DVD game consoles.
  14. EETimes
    ..
  15. New York Times
    . Retrieved 2008-02-24..
  16. ^ Patterson, Dave (June 2003). "A Conversation With Jim Gray". ACM Queue. 1 (4). Archived from the original on April 21, 2005.. (A discussion of recent trends in mass storage.)
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