What are  Data Storage Devices? 

Every day we are presented  with a sea of information. Part of the information may be needed  today , but the bigger part may be useful in the future. To save this information  the Data Storage Devices  are used. The Data Storage Devices  are needed for data protection (for example,  in electronic data security storage  system), for  restoration of any  destroyed documentation, etc. Below you will find  the  descriptions of  Data Storage Devices , based on different kinds of   information carriers:

Optical disks include CD and DVD of different types; all computer hard drives and backup drives are built up on the base of different design and sizes of  magnetic discs; magnetic tapes are used in different backup storage devices. 

For more info click here What are Optical disk drives

Magnetic disk drives include: Large Floppy Disk Drives, Removable Hard Drives, Dual Hard Drives, RAID, etc.

For more info click here What are Magnetic disk drives

Tape drives read date and write  it onto a tape. Tape drives provide a diverse range of options, capable of handling everything from single-PC backup to large corporate Server rooms. They are usually relatively simple to setup and allow you to maintain a reliable unattended backup. Tape capacity keeps getting larger to match drives that are equally growing is size. Tape drives have data capacities of  a few hundred megabytes to  a hundred terabytes. Their transfer speeds also vary considerably. Main disadvantage of tape drives is that they are sequential-access devices, which means that to read any particular block of data, you need to read all the preceding blocks. This makes them much too slow for general-purpose storage operations. However, they are the least expensive media for making backups.

For more info click here What are Tape drives

Today, more than 95% of all computer storage devices are  attached directly to a client computer through various adapters with standardized software protocols such as SCSI, Fibre Channel and others. This type of storage is alternatively called captive storage, server attached storage or direct attached storage (DAS).

   Tips: Criteria of comparison

In process of choosing Data storage devices we recommend to use the following criteria of comparison:

•    Capacity: GBytes, Terabytes - The more the better

•    Price per GB -The less the better

•    Transfer rate -The more the better

•    Price per 100KB/sec-The less the better

•    File Access time - The less the better

•    Media Load time - The less the better

•    Mean time between failures (MTBF)- The more the better (best result is 30,000 hr.)

•    Type of interface