There had been many different types of computer storage devices available to us since the computer was invented. I have listed below and described the different types of computer storage devices that have been available in the market and have been used extensively since the 50s
Flash Disk
Flash disks are called with different names such as pen drive, USB drive, stick drive and more. These are external memory devices that allow one to copy and transfer data from one computer to another. Flash disks are evolving and getting faster then before. When Flash drive first came in the market, it had a very small storage capacity of 32 MB and now these are available with storage capacity of up to 2 TB (2000 GB)
Floppy Disk
These once were a very common type of storage devices for computers, in the 1970s until 1990s. Floppy disks could store only 1.44 MB of data. There were some larger capacity floppy disks that could store 2.5MB of data but these ones were not as common as the 1.44 MB ones.
Hard Disk
Hard disks are commonly used in computers today. This type of computer storage is available in the market with large storage capacities. The hard disk stores data on a magnetic disk and is very fast in reading and writing data from and to it. When hard disk was invented, it could only store 5MB of data. Today, the largest size hard disk that you can get has a huge storage capacity of 15 TB (15,000 GB)
SSD (solid state drive)
These are storage devices that contain flash memory chips to store data. Many modern laptops and desktop PCs now come with SSD instead of Hard disks because SSDs are much faster and also more durable. SSDs are also smaller in size than Hard Disks and also more expensive.
Memory Cards
- SD (Secure Digital) card
- Mini SD card
- Micro SD card
- MMC (Multimedia card)
- xD Picture Card
These cards have different sizes and slightly different shapes and also come in different storage capacities. These memory cards are still being used extensively, specially the Micro SD card, it is commonly used in smart phones to extend the internal phone memory.
Compact Disks (CDs) and DVD (Digital Versatile Disk)
These are still used and and are available in the market. CDs can store data up to 700 MB and DVDs can store 4.7 GB of data in single-sided DVD and up to 17GB of data in double-sided DVD
Tape Drive
These were the cassettes that were so much common in the 1990s for playing music. These same tapes were also used to store computer data on them.
Cloud Storage
This refers to a storage which is located at a remote location, which is accessible to you through Internet. You might have used Google Drive, or One Drive or Drop Box. These all are examples of Cloud storages.
These are the different types of storage devices which have used in the past and we are using at present. The technology of computer storage has advanced so much. The same size of memory card that could store 64MB of data a few years back can now store 64 GB of data, this is really amazing. This is not it, the speed in which the memory sizes are increasing, we will soon be seeing too much more storage sizes that we can not imagine now.
Tags: examples of storage devices, Different Types of Storage Devices, Types of Storage Devices, types of computer storage, types of computer storage
