Most of us probably have played with those floppy, floppy drives. This video explains about how those floppy drives works. The video uses pictures, diagrams, and illustration to help us understand more about how floppy drives work. It’s kinda sad that floppy drives are not widely use again; it is such a cool looking device.
Chances are high that we have used tape drives before. It turns out that tape drives are still used by big companies such as Google and NASA. If I am not mistaken, the GitHub Arctic Code Vault also uses tape drives to store those repositories. This video explains about how tape drives work. The explanations are clear and compact. Moreover, it’s easy to understand.
It turns out that tape drives are very reliable, even though the speed is not the best among other storage devices. Tape drives can last way longer when compared to hard drives and SSD. In my opinion, it is more sensible to use long lasting storage devices in a big company rather than quick but non-durable storage devices, considering, in big companies, old data is still very valuable. Especially for companies such as NASA.
We all have used optical disk before. We used it for various kinds of stuffs, such as watching movies or even looking at those ‘disco lights’ from the back of the disk. Optical disk also has evolved from time to time. The old version of optical disk uses red laser lights to read the data. The newer versions, which is the Blu-ray, uses, well, blue laser lights to read data. Blu-ray disk are better than the old red laser light disk because the blue colour has a smaller wavelength. This means that we can store more data inside a Blu-ray disk because the head is technically smaller. More about optical disk from this video.
We know that hard drives use discs and a head to read and store data. It turns out that there is more to it. This video explains about how hard drives work. It also shows how hard drives evolves from time to time. Moreover, this video is from TED-Ed, that’s another plus. The information is very clear, and the animations are superb.
Note
This video is the short version of the topic.
There is a longer version from the same channel.
Ahh, SSDs. The holy grail of modern storage, kind of. SSDs are so fast as has less space than other storage device. However, SSD prices are sky high when compared to other storages such as hard drives. You can get a 2TB hard disk for the price of a 512GB SSD. However, it is still amazing how that much storage can fit into such small device. It turns out that how SSD store data is quite amazing. More about this in the video. The animation from the video really helps us visualize how SSDs works.
Just when you thought that tape was the first ever storage system, it turns out the first storage system is actually a punch card. It is very amazing how the very-super-awesome SSDs that is very popular these days was all thanks to a simple punch card. Today, a palm sized storage device can store data as much as, or even way more, a room filled with punch cards from the old days. More about the history and evolution of storage devices from this video.
Back then I thought that the BIOS is a part of the operating system. It turns out that those two are two different things. This video will animate the process of booting a computer. Starting from turning the power on until the moment the operating system installed takes control. The animation is surprisingly good. The explanations are also easy to follow.
It turns out that UEFI and BIOS is practically the same thing. Simply put, UEFI is the ‘cooler’ version of BIOS. This video explains more about those two. The video uses real life examples to help us understand about BIOS. The video also explains why the UEFI was created in the first place. Most importantly, this video is presented by the legendary PC-building guy, Linus Torvalds Sebastian.
Bootloader is the program that is used to boot up the computer. Usually, bootloader is stored inside Read Only Memory or ROM. This memory is the memory that the motherboard read when the computer powers on. More about this in the video. The explanations are clear, and the slides presentation is also easy to understand.