Alright, so from what I know so far a disk drive is a common type of secondary storage memory. In my book, it says a disk drive stores data by magnetically encoding it onto a circular disk. There are embedded disk drives and external ones that connect through communication ports. Floppy disks are one type of outdated disk drives in favor of USB's which are memory sticks that are recognized by a computer as a disk drive. It then cells optical disks like CD's and DVD's are popular for data storage, and CD and DVD drives read them. So, I'm a bit confused. I was originally under the impression a drive is a disk or USB that stores data so that it can be stored or transported. Now, it's saying CD and DVD drives read information with lasers; that alone confuses me since I'm unsure if optical devices are drives in themselves or just optical drives. It didn't say if there was a difference. When I looked it up, I got a couple different things. One said a drive was a program and one showed a CD and DVD drive as a CD player (which confused me more since I thought a CD player would be considered hardware). I'm also confused about if CD's and DVD's can act as a secondary memory storage (though I'm not sure since I'm not sure if all secondary memory storage has to come in drives and if optical devices are drives). Some in-depth clarification would be great. I'm dying here and the people that do know about computers have somehow managed to confuse me more or weren't sure themselves, haha.

BTW, I'm also confused about what a hard drive is. When I look it up, a CD and DVD player also pops up. It says a hard disk drive (sometimes abbreviated as Hard drive, HD, or HDD) is a non-volatile memory hardware device that permanently stores and retrieves information. Would a disk drive like a floppy disk be considered a hard drive?

Question

Alright, so from what I know so far a disk drive is a common type of secondary storage memory. In my book, it says a disk drive stores data by magnetically encoding it onto a circular disk. There are embedded disk drives and external ones that connect through communication ports. Floppy disks are one type of outdated disk drives in favor of USB's which are memory sticks that are recognized by a computer as a disk drive. It then cells optical disks like CD's and DVD's are popular for data storage, and CD and DVD drives read them. So, I'm a bit confused. I was originally under the impression a drive is a disk or USB that stores data so that it can be stored or transported. Now, it's saying CD and DVD drives read information with lasers; that alone confuses me since I'm unsure if optical devices are drives in themselves or just optical drives. It didn't say if there was a difference. When I looked it up, I got a couple different things. One said a drive was a program and one showed a CD and DVD drive as a CD player (which confused me more since I thought a CD player would be considered hardware). I'm also confused about if CD's and DVD's can act as a secondary memory storage (though I'm not sure since I'm not sure if all secondary memory storage has to come in drives and if optical devices are drives). Some in-depth clarification would be great. I'm dying here and the people that do know about computers have somehow managed to confuse me more or weren't sure themselves, haha.

BTW, I'm also confused about what a hard drive is. When I look it up, a CD and DVD player also pops up. It says a hard disk drive (sometimes abbreviated as Hard drive, HD, or HDD) is a non-volatile memory hardware device that permanently stores and retrieves information. Would a disk drive like a floppy disk be considered a hard drive?

kikuo · Answer

@rsmith6559

kikuo · Answer

I probably got some things wrong in my post since I'm just learning, so feel free to correct me if I did.

kikuo · Answer

http://superuser.com/questions/1085803/im-confused-about-what-a-driver-exactly-is/1085813#1085813 If it helps Smith, this guy replied to me. Though, he didn't answer all my questions and some of what he said was just a tad confusing since I'm not that advanced yet. Right now I'm in page 9. So, we're trying to settle down the basics since the rest of the book works off of them.

rsmith6559 · Answer

Floppy disks are named floppy because the original 8" floppy was, floppy.  Hard disks are rigid.  All disk drives resemble phonographs in prinicple.  The differences are that the needle is a read/write magnetic head, and the surface of the disk is flat and covered with magnetic tape material.  If you want to get a certain file, the arm moves to a certain track and reads the file from it.  Because a track can hold so much, it's sliced up like a pie would be into sectors, to better match the size of file to minimize waste.

A hard disk drive has many platters (record albums) and many arms (to read each side of each platter).  The same track on all of the platters is called a cylinder.  Five platters (two sides each) could take a byte and two parity bits and store it using one bit of circular space.

CD ROMs and DVDs are literally burned.  A laser burns a pit into the shiny surface when a bit is on, and doesn't when it's off.  When they're read, if the laser is reflected, it's a zero if it's absorbed or scattered, it's the pit, a one.  In principle at least.

Memory volitility is about what happens when there's no more power.  RAM loses it's info, so it's volatile.  Floppies, HDs, CDs, DVDs, SSDs, ROM and PROM still have the info, so they're non-volatile.

SSDs (Solid State Drive) is the new thing.  They're cost is becoming reasonable, and a problem with limited numbers of writes before they wear out are being fixed.  Basically, they're a chip that can maintain its information without power.  Take a chip, mount it on a USB, add a driver program and you have a Flash drive!

The optical media, CDs and DVDs, are basically write once or a few times and read after that.  Magnetic and SSD can be written to and read many, many times.  The write problems that SSDs used to have was that memory locations would wear out after ~3000 writes.