What is a Secondary Storage? Types, Purposes, and Examples
The purpose of secondary storage device will automatically be understood and appreciated if you know its applications. Whether you are running a business, want to protect personal photos, save essential media files and software data backups, or want to store important documents, you need secondary storage besides primary storage devices.
Secondary storage, different from primary storage used on devices, acts as a vital backup, an archive, and an extended storage area, safeguarding our data and ensuring its longevity.
In this guide, we’re taking a close look at secondary storage. We’ll break down its types, explain its role, and share real-life examples to show just how crucial it is.
What is the Definition of the Term 'Secondary Storage'?
When people ask, “What is secondary storage?” they often refer to non-volatile storage devices that can be internal or external to a computer system.
Secondary storage is a supplementary data repository that complements a computer’s primary storage. It facilitates long-term data preservation and offers a cost-effective solution, although it may sacrifice speed in data retrieval compared to primary storage.
People utilise these secondary storage devices to recover data if primary storage crashes and a data backup is available. Understanding What is RTO and RPO can help you further appreciate the importance of secondary storage in maintaining business continuity.
What is Stored in Storage Devices?
We can divide data in secondary storage devices into three categories:
- Backup Data: It refers to duplicates of information from the primary storage. This type of data safeguards against potential losses from mishaps, system failures, or fraudulent activities. When necessary, users can reintegrate this data into the primary storage.
- Archival Data: Archival data comprises information that is no longer essential for routine operations but is necessary for legal, historical, or compliance stipulations. Transferring such data to secondary storage allows for space conservation and performance enhancement in primary storage.
- Cold Data: Refers to information that is seldom accessed or modified but still holds value or potential for future use. This data type is best stored in secondary storage devices with low operational costs and high storage capacity, albeit with reduced speed and performance. All S3 cloud providers provide cold storage.
Why Do Computers Need Secondary Storage?
Secondary storage complements primary storage by providing an area for data that doesn’t require immediate or frequent access. This migration mitigate the storage burden on prior devices, improving their performance. For businesses, this is a key element in a comprehensive Business continuity vs disaster recovery strategy.
What is the Purpose of Secondary Storage?
Secondary storage aims to provide a reliable, enduring, and economically viable medium for retaining data beyond the capacity constraints of primary storage.
It serves as a contingency measure against primary storage malfunction or data corruption.
It enables advanced functionalities such as data analytics, sharing, and collaboration by permitting data access across multiple devices and geographical locales.
Examples of Secondary Storage Devices
There are various types of secondary storage devices. Some popular and well-known examples of secondary storage devices include:
- Hard Disk Drive (HDD): If you asked someone what secondary storage was back in the old days, he would have told you HDD. They would not be able to give any other storage device examples. HDDs offer massive storage capacity but have compromised speed and power consumption disadvantages. These can be internal, external, or networked options (NAS).
- Solid-State Drive (SSD): Offers high data retrieval speeds but has restricted storage capacity. To understand how reliable are SSDs, you can read more here.
- Thumb Drive: These are some of the most well-known secondary storage devices most individuals and businesses use. These thumb-sized units are also computer storage devices because you can quickly boot your Windows through them and take them anywhere. Today, you can promptly get thumb drives with more than 1TB capacity.
- SD Card: Moderate data retrieval speeds and storage capacity.
- CD/DVD: Low data retrieval speed and limited storage capacity.
- Tape Drive: Tap drives have high storage capacity and cost-effectiveness but slow data retrieval and limited accessibility.
The last four types are legacy now. However, I have added them because many legacy systems use these devices. Surprisingly, many sectors use tape drives because their storage capacity can still be more significant than that of hard disks.
Can RAMs be Used for Secondary Storage?
Is RAM secondary storage? Many people need clarification on this. RAMs do store data in them, but they are volatile. There are different types of storage devices: volatile and non-volatile. Volatile devices store data and lose it when the power is disconnected. Non-volatile devices, however, retain the data even if the power is disconnected.
RAMs provide higher read-write speeds than other devices but offer less storage capacity as a trade-off. That is why RAM is used inside computers but not as a memory storage device. They are not even used as storage devices for computers because you lose the data once you shut them down.
Cloud-based Secondary Storages
When discussing the types and benefits of secondary storage, you should consider cloud-based platforms. What adds to their popularity is that you do not need to purchase memory storage devices. With your broadband internet connection, you can shift your data to a cloud service provider’s storage device.
For those enterprises whose data tends to be very large and is constantly increasing, purchasing a new data storage device after regular intervals will not be a cost-effective solution. Plus, with cloud platforms, you are assured of 100% uptime because of their redundancy in keeping the service alive 24/7.
Cloud-based storage options will save you money because you won’t have to take security precautions for your data. Your cloud service provider will do the job.
Cloud platforms are also scalable. You can adjust your storage plans and increase it whenever you need. Additionally, you can get discounts as you go for higher storage plans.
Therefore, using data storage devices on the cloud will be cost-effective, scalable, and secure, and it guarantees zero downtime.
Conclusion
Secondary storage, by its definition of secondary storage, provides efficient data management, offering a budget-friendly and dependable solution for long-term data preservation.
Although it may come with a slight trade-off regarding data retrieval speed, its advantages far surpass this minor limitation. From hard drives and SSDs to optical disks and cloud storage, the diverse types of secondary storage cater to various needs and purposes.