Instructor: In this Lesson,
we're going to talk about removable storage,
now removable storage
really refers to any kind of storage device
that can be moved from computer to computer
without you having to open up the case
and remove it from the inside.
This can also include any kind of storage media
where you can remove the media from inside of the drive,
such as if you have a tape drive
and you pull that tape out after you've done your backups.
So as we move through this lesson,
we're going to talk all about removable mass storage devices
including the different driving closures they use,
flash drives, memory cards, tape drives,
floppy dish drives and things like that.
First, we need to talk about hot swappable.
Now hot swappable
is a term that's really important to understand,
especially when it comes to these removable storage devices.
For example,
if you've ever used an external hard drive
in your laptop or desktop,
and you've plugged it in using USB
and the system automatically recognized the drive
once you connected it,
that is because there's a hot swappable connection there.
Hot swappable drive interfaces include things like USB,
Thunderbolt, and eSATA.
All three of these can support this hot swappable feature.
Now this means that anytime you connect a drive,
your operating system
will automatically recognize the drive.
But in addition to that, you can safely eject that drive
by removing that hardware and then unplugging it
without losing your data.
With a traditional hard drive, you can't do that.
You can't just unplug your SATA
or pay to connector inside of your case
without actually shutting down the computer first
and then safely removing it.
So hot swappable is really important,
especially when we talk about removable storage drives
because it gives us this ability
to add remove additional storage to our system
without having to shut down the entire computer
like we had to do in the old days.
Now, when it comes to SATA,
it's really important to understand
that it does support hot swapping,
but only if you enable AHCI inside of your bios or UEFI.
When I'm talking about AHCI,
I'm talking about the advanced host controller interface,
and this is a technical standard
that was developed by Intel
that allows you to have this hot swappable capability
with SATA devices.
In a lot of systems, AHCI is not enabled by default,
and so by default, SATA usually is not hot swappable
until you go and enable this capability
inside your bios or UEFI.
This is because when SATA was originally developed,
it was developed as replacement for PATA
and it was designed as an internal connector,
but over time, there was an extension made to SATA
called eSATA.
And eSATA simply means external SATA.
And so it's using the exact same cable and connector,
but there's actually a header
that gives you an external SATA port known as eSATA
on the outside of your case.
So you could plug in a hard drive using eSATA
and be able to use this hot swap capability
once you enable AHCI, which is why AHCI was added
as an additional capability for most modern systems.
Now, why would you want to use eSATA?
Well, it has a pretty fast speed,
it's pretty comparable to USB 3.0.
If you're using USB 3.0,
you can get about five gigabits per second with eSATA,
if you're using version two,
you can get three gigabits per second,
and if you're using version three,
you can get up to six gigabits per second.
So for a long time, this was a great way
of providing removable storage at very high speeds.
But with the newest versions of USB,
we can actually get speeds of 10 or 20
or even up to 40 gigabits per second,
making eSATA not as popular as it used to be.
Now, if you've ever used a portable hard drive
or external hard drive,
you may be wondering what actually is inside of that.
What makes it special?
How is it different from the regular hard drive
inside of your computer?
Well, the answer is, it really isn't that different.
Instead, they just take an internal hard drive
and they put it into what's known as a drive enclosure,
which is either made out of steel, metal or plastic.
These drive enclosures simply allow you to take
any kind of internal hard drive, such as a 7,200 RPM,
3.5 inch, eight terabyte hard drive
and put it into the enclosure.
On the enclosure,
there will be a connector on the backside,
generally, this is going to be SATA 3
and it's going to have both data and power connectors.
And then on the outside of the case,
there'll be whatever connector
you're going to use to connect your computer,
which could be eSATA, or more commonly USB or Thunderbolt.
By using this drive enclosure,
we're able to convert the data
from that SATA connection
coming off of the back of the hard drive
into something that is more commonly used on laptops,
desktops and other devices like USB.
So if you go to the store
and you look at all of the external hard drives,
you'll see they come in lots of different shapes and sizes.
There's really large ones
which are using that three and a half inch form factor
inside of a drive enclosure,
while there's others that are using the 2.5 inch
form factor drive inside those portable drive enclosures.
In addition to that,
they also make even smaller ones these days
that rely on SSDs inside of those removable enclosures.
For example, I personally own a one terabyte portable SSD
that connects to my system using a USBC connection
and that is placed inside of an external drive enclosure,
instead of me just carrying around this circuit board
containing the SSD all day,
I have this nice case that holds it
and that is a drive enclosure.
Next let's talk about flash drives
which you normally hear referred to as a USB drive
or a thumb drive.
Now, the reason people call these USB drives
is because most commonly you're going to see these
with a USB connection, but they don't always have to.
I've seen ones that use Thunderbolt,
lightning connectors or other data connectors as well,
but by far,
the most common is the standard USB type-A connector
on the end of one of these thumb drives.
When you're using one of these thumb drives,
it is essentially just a plastic case with a USB connector,
and on the inside of that case,
you will find these circuits or chips
that essentially are like the SSDs
that we use in modern drives.
In general, I find that these thumb drives
do use a lower quality than a standard SSD would
giving them less performance.
But overall they're still pretty fast
and they work really well.
The great thing about these flash drives or thumb drives
as we like to call them is that they are small and portable
and they come in lots of different shapes and sizes.
For example, I had one on my key chain before
that was just a little bit larger
than a standard USB type-A port.
This was extremely small
and yet it could still hold 64 gigabytes
of data on that drive, making it very small
and portable to carry with me anywhere I was going.
And that's really the big benefit of these flash drives
is you could take them anywhere with you
because they are so small and they can hold a lot of data.
Now the next thing we need to talk about is memory cards.
Now memory cards are simply a different form factor
that's going to be used in different types of products,
such as video cameras, digital cameras, smartphones,
tablets, wearables, and IoT devices.
There are numerous formats of memory cards out there
but the most common is SD, MiniSD, MicroSD, CompactFlash,
and memory stick.
Memory Stick is a proprietary protocol
that's used on Sony devices,
whereas the others are all used
across a variety of different manufacturers in the field.
In order to read or write to a memory card,
you need to have a memory card reader on your system.
Some computers have these
built into the front of their case,
while others will use an external memory card reader
that connects to your system using USB.
For example, on my laptop,
it has an SD card reader built right into the system.
But if I wanted to read something
like a memory stick from Sony or a compact flashcard,
I would have to use an external reader
connected through USB or USBC.
These days,
you're going to find memory cards in all different sizes,
in the old days, the original SD or secure digital cards
had a maximum capacity of about two gigabytes in size.
But these days,
you can get an SDHC card that goes up to 32 gigabytes
or an SDXC card that goes up to two terabytes in size.
Currently, as I'm recording this video, I'm using an SDXE
which is a 256 gigabyte secure digital card
that stores the recording for me.
Now, when you're looking at these cards,
they can operate at vastly different speeds.
So it's important to look at the speed rating
when you're buying a card.
These can go up to 25 megabytes per second
with the original specification
or up to 108 megabytes per second using UHS,
if you're using UHS-2,
this can have speeds of up to 312 megabytes per second,
and if you're using a UHS-3, you can actually have a speed
of up to 624 megabytes per second.
So depending on your application, you may need a faster card
to be able to handle that application.
For example, if you're doing full 4K video
and recording that to a video camera,
you're probably going to need something
like a UHS-3 specification,
which operates at up to 624 megabytes per second
because you're trying to store so much data at one time.
Whereas on the other hand,
if you're just using a simple voice recorder,
you can get away
with the original specification of 25 megabytes per second
because most voice recordings
are only operating at about half a megabyte per second
and therefore 25 megabytes per second
is plenty fast for that use case.
The next thing we're going to talk about is tape drives.
Now, most of you are not going to use tape drives
in your home environment, but if you work in a corporation
and you're working on servers,
most of them are going to be using tape drives,
and tape drives are a great example
of a removable storage device.
Now in recent years,
tape drives are losing popularity to cloud-based backups,
but you are still going to see this
in a wide variety of applications out there in the field.
When you look at a tape drive,
it uses a magnetic tape inside of a plastic case
that we placed into a reader,
and you'll be able to copy a backup
of the data of your system onto that tape.
The great thing about these tapes is you can then take them
and ship them off to another facility,
and that way you can have offsite backup of your data.
For example, I used to be the IT director
for a large network and security operation center,
and every evening
we would do a backup of our systems to a tape.
Then at the end of the week, we would take all the tapes
and we would ship them to our backup facility,
and that way, if our main facility burned down
or had a catastrophe,
we would still have all of our data safe and sound
at the other site.
Now, as I said, a lot of companies
have moved to the cloud for their backups instead of tapes,
but tape backups is still something used widely
in government and military organizations.
So I wanted you to be aware of it.
When it comes to a tape,
each tape can store a certain amount of data.
If you're using a standard tape,
these usually will hold about 140 gigabytes of data.
Whereas the LTO Ultrium tapes
can hold up to three terabytes on a single tape.
That amount of capacity is usually enough
to be able to back up most systems, but if not,
your system can span multiple tapes
and you can keep going until you get the entire backup done,
even if it becomes a set of three, five or even 50 tapes
to get a complete backup.
The final type of removal storage device I want to talk about
in this lesson is floppy drives.
Now floppy drives are a really old
and legacy way of storing data
that you would take out of your system.
This was around before we had USB thumb drives,
this was around before we had SSDs,
this was around back in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
And honestly, most people today
are not going to be using a floppy drive
unless they're working on a specific system
in a legacy environment.
For example, if you're working
with some ICS and SCADA systems
or you're working with some military hardware,
some of those still rely on floppy discs to get their data.
And so I wanted to make you aware of it.
If you look at the save icon in any application these days,
that is a floppy disc,
and technically, that is called a 3.5 inch floppy disc.
That is what we used to save
all of our documents on in school,
and we would be able to take it home with us
instead of using a USB drive like we do today.
Now those drives can't hold much data.
In fact, a standard floppy disc can only handle
1.44 megabytes of data on it, which is not even
really one picture today taken by your iPhone.
So it really isn't going to be able to hold a lot of data
but like I said,
it is used in some of these older legacy systems.
If you're working with a legacy system
and you need to be able to get access to a floppy disc drive
and your computer doesn't have one,
you can buy external floppy disc drives
using a USB connection
to be able to connect it to a modern system,
because the original floppy disc drives
actually connected with a 34 bit internal IDE
or PATA cable
and required a Berg power cable to connect to it
and give it power.
The problem is I haven't seen a modern motherboard
in at least the last 10 years
that provided that type of connection to the motherboard.
And this is why there are
external USB floppy drives available for sale
if you have one of these use cases
where you're going to have to use a floppy disc.
All right, I know that was a ton of information
when it comes to removable storage
but I want you to remember a couple of key things,
first, when it comes to removable mass storage devices,
this means any type of device
that you can put data on and take with you.
That's going to include things like external hard drives,
USB thumb drives, memory cards, backup tapes
and floppy discs.
In addition to optical discs like CDs, DVDs
and Blueray discs
but we'll talk more about those in their own lesson.
And the other thing to remember
is if you're using an external hard drive or SSD,
these are actually the same type
that are going to be used inside your system.
The only difference is they're placed into a drive enclosure
that converts their data port
into something that's usable as an external interface
that's hot swappable, like USB, Thunderbolt
or an eSATA connection.