One key issue to consider when choosing a type of magnetic removable storage device is compatibility. The category of magnetic drives, however, still has its place in everyday computing as a means for storing smaller applications, documents and small databases. With today’s high-capacity hard disks, however, you would need countless floppy disks to backup a system - even a 2GB Jaz drive isn’t suited to archiving. In its infancy, magnetic drives were used largely for back-up and archiving. You can record and erase data on a magnetic disk any number of times. On magnetic disks the data is encoded as microscopic magnetized needles on the disk’s surface. The third category of removable storage we cover highlights flash memory storage options, which is also called solid state storage because the drives contain no moving parts. Most recently we have seen removable storage take a new turn as the consumer’s love of digital cameras and other portable electronic devices has emerged. Secondly, we have optical drives, which is a collection of removable storage options such as CD-ROM, DVD, and Magneto-Optical Drives. The first and oldest technology is in the form of magnetic drives, which includes removable media storage such as floppy drives, hard drives, Zip and Jazz drives. Removable storage can be broken down into three categories, based on the technology used by the device to record and store data on the removable media. From a 1.44MB capacity we now see removable storage with the capacity to hold more 20GB of data. As computers and technologies have advanced over the years, removable storage technology has moved right along as well. Since the early 1980’s we have seen the standard floppy disk drives with the removable 3.5 inch diskettes. Removable storage is not a new concept in the computer industry. These are just a few examples of how we use removable storage in everyday computing environments. The software you buy to install on your computer comes on removable storage media and people will always have a need for making backups and archiving important data or transporting data between computers. Regardless of how big hard drive capacities get, there will always be a need for removable storage, sometimes called portable storage. Consequently, disks are the storage medium of choice for most types of data. And unlike RAM, disks hold on to data even when the computer is turned off. Accessing data from a disk is not as fast as accessing data from main memory, but disks are much cheaper.

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