[Jason Springer]

Physical storage is made up of disk drives, RAID storage, optical drives, flash drives, and memory cards. Disk drives have two different types of drives, magnetic drives which have moving parts, and solid-state drives which don’t have moving parts. Solid-state drives have certain advantages including it’s quieter than magnetic drives, faster, and made in smaller form factors. RAID storage is a more complex form of storage made up of multiple magnetic disk drives that have data spread out through each drive compared to having all the data on just one drive to store it faster or more fault-tolerant. The five main types of RAID storage options mentioned in the book are RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, and 10. Optical drives are an older type of storage device that includes CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays which commonly store music or movies. The other forms of physical storage which include flash drives and memory cards are temporary types of storage that are more convenient for mobilizing data or files.