[James Settle]

Physical computer storage refers to disk drives, RAID storage, optical drives, flash drives, memory cards or SD cards, as well as magnetic tape drives. Disk drives are usually magnetic hard disk drives, or solid-state drives. Magnetic hard disk drives contain plates/platters made of aluminum or glass that can be magnetized & demagnetized to store binary data in the form of zeros and ones. Solid state drives are non-volatile flash memory chips which store the same information. While both HDDs and SSDs can be housed internally and plugged into the motherboard, they can also be connected externally by a USB cable. You can acquire these drives in a 3.5” size, generally for desktops or 2.5” size, generally for laptops. Additionally solid-state drives are typically created for various expansion slots such as PCIe, NVMe and M.2. SSDs offered in these formats are usually much smaller than their 2.5” encasings but may come in these sizes for standard accommodations.