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 and 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 far 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 looked at various file systems associated with various OSs and saw that the smallest allocation of data is called a cluster, which can reside in slack space. Slack space is 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 always resides some information about...