Top 10 List of Week 09

1. Magnetic Disc Memory

   Magnetic Disc is a type of secondary memory that is a flat disc covered with a magnetic coating to hold information. The polarized information in one direction is represented by 1, and vice versa. The direction is indicated by 0. It is less expensive than RAM and can store large amounts of data, but the data access rate is slower than main memory because of secondary memory. Read more on this article!

2. Solid State Drive

   SSD, short for Solid State Drive, is a non-volatile storage device. It stores the data on flash memory chips and maintains the data in a permanent state, even when the power is off. Unlike the Hard Disk Drives (HDD), it doesn’t have any moving parts. That’s why it generates little heat and consumes less power.

3. Magnetic Tape Memory

   Magnetic Tapes are used primarily for backups. Back then, it was used for regular secondary storage before the day of hard disk drives. Data read/write speed is slower because of sequential access.

4. Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks

   Redundant Array of Independent Disks or RAID is a way of storing the same data in different places to protect data in the case of a drive failure. The evaluation points for a RAID System are reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. Read more on this article!

5. RAID Levels

   There are five RAID levels, each optimized for a specific situation. All RAID levels except RAID 0 offer protection from a single drive failure. If you want to read more about these levels, you can check this article!

6. BIOS

   The BIOS is special software that interfaces the major hardware components of your computer with the operating system. It is usually stored on a flash memory chip on the motherboard, but sometimes the chip is another ROM. Read more about how BIOS works in the article!

7. UEFI

   Such as BIOS, UEFI is low-level software that starts when you boot your PC before booting your operating system. It is a more modern solution, supporting larger hard drives, faster boot times, more security features, etc. Check this article if you want to know more about it!

8. Boot Manager

   A boot manager is a software utility for choosing what operating system to load from a list of operating systems installed on a hard drive. It allows a user to boot to CD/DVD drives, floppy drives, or USB drives without accessing the BIOS.

9. Grand Unified Boot Loader

   GRUB is primarily used for booting Linux distributions. GRUB and GRUB2 look very similar, but GRUB 2 is more user-friendly. It allows the user to modify the configuration using grub-mkconfig.

10. Booting an Operating System

    This article explains about Intel-based startup. It also explains about non-Intel systems such as Mac OS. Check out this article if you’re curious about the booting process.