Summary

In this chapter, we took the time to cover some of the basics of non-volatile storage media, which stores data even after there is no power supplied to the medium. Non-volatile media includes different types of HDDs, such as mechanical and solid-state PATA, as well as SATA drives, flash drives, and memory cards.

Newer storage media devices, including SSDs, use a special type of flash memory called NAND flash to store data. This flash memory is significantly faster and more durable than traditional mechanical drives as the devices contain no moving parts. However, they are still quite costly for now.

We also had a look at various filesystems associated with various operating systems and saw that the smallest allocation of data is called a cluster, in which slack space can reside. Slack space is the unused space within a cluster in which data can be hidden. Data itself has different states and can be at rest, in motion, or in use. Regardless of the state of the data, there...