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This lesson covers the three main types of secondary storage — magnetic, optical, and solid-state — their characteristics, advantages, disadvantages, and suitable uses. This is a key topic for AQA and OCR GCSE Computer Science.
Secondary storage (also called external storage or permanent storage) is storage that is non-volatile — it retains data even when the computer is powered off. Unlike RAM, secondary storage is not directly accessed by the CPU during the fetch-decode-execute cycle. Instead, data must be loaded from secondary storage into RAM before the CPU can use it.
Magnetic storage devices store data using magnetised particles on a spinning surface. The read/write head magnetises tiny areas of the disk surface to represent binary 0s and 1s.
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