CS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Auxiliary Memory, Computer Data Storage, Booting

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: CS100
• Professor: Kevin Harrigan

Document Summary

Module 1. 1 hardware components (cid:894)cont"d part 1(cid:895) Secondary storage: the long term/permanent storage of a computer. Types of secondary storage: hard drives, flash drives, cds, dvds, magnetic tapes, and floppy disks. Include several magnetic disks that can store a large amount of info in a small amount of space have a physical motor that spins the magnetic discs. Flash drives (i. e. usb sticks, sd cards, and solid state drives ssds) No moving parts; hence require less power are faster than hard drives. Lower capacities and more expensive than hard drives. Traditionally known as ram (random access memory) of the computer. Cpu cannot access secondary storage directly, so info is copied from secondary storage to primary memory (cid:449)here it (cid:272)a(cid:374) (cid:271)e (cid:862)used(cid:863) E(cid:454)a(cid:373)ple #1: (cid:449)he(cid:374) (cid:455)ou lau(cid:374)(cid:272)h a(cid:374) app the o (cid:272)opies the progra(cid:373) i(cid:374)to pri(cid:373)ar(cid:455) (cid:373)e(cid:373)or(cid:455) fro(cid:373) secondary storage, then starts the program; this explains the delay when launching an app.