[Isabelle Tubbs]

Because computers can do many different tasks and have many components, the computer system needs a space to store the information to complete these processes and use its resources, like its hardware and software. A major way a computer stores this is through drives. Disk drives can be magnetic drives, which use a binary system, or solid state drives, which use flash memory chips. Additionally, it could be a binary drive which is a magnetic hard drive that has flash memory chips.

The way these drives are organized can vary, but RAID can offer some efficient options depending on a user’s needs. Some drives may be stored with striping, which splits the data. Others can use mirroring, which copies the data on each disk. Finally, it could be used with blocks, creating a more complex way of storing the data and allowing more fault tolerance. Some RAIDs can also use a combination of these methods.

An additional option for storage is optical drives. Compact disk drives, digital video disks, and Blu-ray are optical drives that I think most of us have used at some point. They contain data that can be used by the computer once the drive is connected.