Removable Storage

What Removable Media Is

Removable media would be any of those devices that we plug into the computer, store data onto it, and typically would unplug it and move it somewhere else. We could of course do that with something like a solid state drive: open up the chassis, plug it in, connect it, save data to it, and then unplug it. So this is removable. But the key to removable media would be those items that we typically would unplug and plug back in to move this data around from machine to machine.

Removable Media as a Characteristic

I put removable media in as a characteristic, so this is a characteristic of different media that we have. If there's something like paper, paper just by the nature of what it is is removable, right? Like we take it, we can move it from computer to computer, and take these punch cards and put it into another computer.

We also have optical drives. Now, all the cases that I can think about, optical drives are removable media. I can't think of an exception to that, although there probably is an exception, I just can't think of it right now.

And then when it comes to magnetic and solid state, we can find both examples of removable media and non-removable media. So we have both examples when it comes to magnetic and solid state storage.

Examples of Removable Media

Here are some examples of removable media. Here we have a floppy drive. Here's a flash drive, and this is what it looks like inside of that flash drive. Here we have a micro SD card. It's a really small little SD card, a secure digital card, and that can slide into this adapter, and this would just be a regular size SD card right here.

And then we have tape backup. This actually would go into a cassette, so this is missing some components to it, but this would be put into a device that we could save data into.

And here, actually this isn't media here, this is a drive right here, but it's an optical drive. What we would do is we'd put media inside of this, and then we would shut that media on there, and then what would happen is that this little laser right here would come out and start reading that information. So that becomes then a removable media, because we can eject it and bring it to another computer. So that's a CD right there, and then this side would actually face down. This is where the data is at.

Non-Removable Media

Now, in contrast, we have some non-removable media here. Here's an SSD. In fact, all of these are SSD, solid state drives, and these would not typically be moved from place to place. And if you want to see inside of what this would look like, this is what's inside of that. So they all have these chips on it, these solid state drive chips.

But what we could do is we could encase it in something like this. So inside of this device right here is one of these. In fact, you can see it's about the same size. And what it does is it converts, it's probably SATA inside there, and it converts that SATA into USB, so I could plug it in USB. Now what I've done is I've converted it into a removable device, because we typically unplug and plug this back in to move it from different computers. So that's an example of where we've taken a not typically removable device.