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Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. [1]: 15–16 The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer is what manipulates data by performing computations.
Disk storage is now used in both computer storage and consumer electronic storage, e.g., audio CDs and video discs (VCD, DVD and Blu-ray). Data on modern disks is stored in fixed length blocks, usually called sectors and varying in length from a few hundred to many thousands of bytes. Gross disk drive capacity is simply the number of disk ...
In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. For most disks, each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs), and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs , DVD-ROMs and BD-ROMs . [ 1 ]
The STC 4305 was significantly faster than its mechanical counterparts and cost around $400,000 for a 45 MB capacity. [116] Though early SSD-like devices existed, they were not widely used due to their high cost and small storage capacity. In the late 1980s, companies like Zitel began selling DRAM-based SSD products under the name "RAMDisk."
Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a character of text in the computer, which depended on computer hardware architecture, but today it almost always means eight bits – that is, an octet. An 8-bit byte can represent 256 (2 8) distinct values, such as non-negative integers from 0 to 255, or signed integers from −128 to ...
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 ...
The best-known floppy disk drive for the C64, the 1541 is a single-sided 170-kilobyte drive for 5¼" disks. The 1541 directly followed the Commodore 1540 (meant for the VIC-20 ). The disk drive uses group coded recording (GCR) and contains a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, doubling as a disk controller and on-board disk operating system ...
That said, the price of high-capacity drives has fallen rapidly, and this is indeed an effect of density. The highest capacity drives use more platters, essentially individual hard drives within the case. As the density increases, the number of platters can be reduced, leading to lower costs. Hard drives are often measured in terms of cost per bit.