Talk:Mass storage

"Mass Storage" and "Mass storage"
Both Mass Storage and Mass storage now exist. Sorry about that. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.98.5 (talk) 05:30, 22 April 2005 (UTC)

See the articles re Case sensitivity and Case Sensitivity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.98.5 (talk) 12:38, 22 April 2005 (UTC)
 * Resolved. &sect; Music Sorter &sect;  (talk) 22:55, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Fixed and removable disks
The differences between fixed disk and removable disk, hard/rigid disk and floppy disk should be brought out. Now they are not. There are merely a few notes. I changed redir of fixed disk to hard disk but it would need a page of its own, for example. Not it almost reflects current usage as most fixed disks are hard disks. Not all hard disks are fixed disks, though.

There should probably be a clear tree and explanation on the terms by physical stature and function. Perhaps here. Then you could add the definitions and jumps to the different related articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.216.199.14 (talk) 00:12, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Why is it so important if a device is removable or not? This is trivial. Hard-or-floppy is orthogonal to removable-or-fixed. In fact, almost all contemporary hard drives are removable in their nature (except PATA). --Kubanczyk 18:51, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

This Article Is Way Off Point
Mass storage should be descriptive of very large storage of data as in the [http://www.msstc.org/ IEEE Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee] and not the local storage of personal computers or even servers. As such the mention of USB drives, floppy drives, etc in this article is way off the mark. The article needs to be completely rewritten. To that end I sent an email to the IEEE MSS Executive Committee members suggesting one of them rewrite this article. Tom94022 18:27, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I think it may be a case of semantics with the word Mass (i.e. and what you mean by 'very large storage' - exactly how much?), but most references found include USB drives, floppy drives in their descriptions (pretty much any storage device really). If you find a cite that excludes such mediums from the Mass Storage category, then go ahead and fix.
 * Jwoodger (talk) 01:45, 23 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I have to belatedly agree with Tom94022 on this. To describe a 2000 word drum or a 320 KB floppy disk as mass storage is bizarre at best. Historically the term mass storage has meant quantities of data well in excess of what could be economically stored on disk, e.g., IBM 2321 (Data Cell), RCA 3488 (R.A.C.E). Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:39, 9 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I've been working with computers since 1960, and I've never seen the term mass storage applied to either perforated paper/mylar tape or to punched cards. The first devices to which I saw the term applied were the NCR Card Random Access Memory (CRAM), the RCA 3488 R.A.C.E and the IBM 2321 Data Cell.


 * The reference to volatile versus nonvolatile is flat wrong. RAM implemented with magnetic core or magnetic thin film is nonvolatile, but it is certainly not mass memory. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:29, 27 June 2012 (UTC)


 * — The term “mass”, traditionally applied to “high-capacity” persistent storage, has always been linked to the greater capacity of those units compared to the smaller capacity of work memory (directly addressable by the processor). Of course, the capacity of any mass-storage device (such as a floppy disc) has to be compared to the RAM capacity on contemporary systems. In the 1960s, this was megabytes versus kilobytes; nowadays, it’s terabytes (or petabytes) versus gigabytes. The scale has changed, but the relationship is the same: for performance reasons, we’d like to store all our data in RAM; but economy (linked to capacity) and persistence requirements dictate that we store it on mass-storage devices and load it into RAM as needed for processing. So, yes, the term applies (and has always applied) to local storage devices (including floppy disc drives, hard drives, USB storage devices, etc.). Not that there was anything other than local storage when the term was coined! If some new meaning (for example, very large storage) ever becomes widespread, then the right thing to do would be, not to “completely rewrite” this article but, instead, to either expand this article to explain the new meaning, or to create a new article if the new meaning warrants it. — Wlgrin 04:02, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Needs a disk drive? Puppy Linux doesn't
"Desktop operating systems such as Windows are now so closely tied to the performance characteristics of magnetic disks that it is difficult to deploy them on other media like flash memory without running into space constraints, suffering serious performance problems or breaking applications." -- Um, AFAIK, Puppy Linux and its associated applications runs great from a pen drive. -- Writtenonsand (talk) 13:11, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Comparison of non-rotating removable storage versus CDRW and DVDRW?
Should there be a discussion of the inroads made by nonrotationg stoage into the CD and DVD R/W marketplace? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:28, 4 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't think CD and DVD R/W have ever been considered Mass storage nor can I find anything along this line in the article so I wouldn't add such material here. Note there have been a couple of Blue Ray DVD Changer products proposed that would rise to the level of Mass storage and could be mentioned the article if they became real. Tom94022 (talk) 19:20, 5 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, CD and DVD media are a lot larger than some things that were written up as mass storage. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:04, 23 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Not really in contemporaneous terms. CD-RW came to market circa 1997 at about 650 MB at which time HDDs were for the most part > 1 GB (source: 1997 Disk/Trend).  Similar issue with DVDs.  It seems their capacities were never higher than the then contemporaneous other secondary storage (HDDs for the most part) for anyone to label them mass storage.  The whole concept of "mass storage"  is greatly affected by the time and context of usage.  Tom94022 (talk) 22:35, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

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Not used by SNIA Dictionary
Term is obliviously vague, do we need dedicated Wikipedia page for this term? This article seems very trivial to me. Ushkin N (talk) 00:49, 30 July 2016 (UTC)


 * — The term has been used for decades and that is well documented (I’ll add a citation). It may feel dated, but it is still in use. The SNIA dictionary (which you cite) is not an encyclopedia of storage-related technologies; it is a glossary of technologies that are currently pertinent to the on-going activities of the SNIA. For example, quite logically, it does not have an entry for “floppy disc”. That doesn’t diminish the merits of Wikipedia’s article on that topic, nor does it indicate that floppy discs were not storage devices. — Wlgrin 04:13, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * It's well documented with inconsistent meanings. On PC-based platforms it typically means storage larger than the DRAM, but on other platforms it has the original meaning, storage larger than that provided by disk drives. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:37, 10 October 2019 (UTC)


 * I don't think it is well documented in the article and as Chatul stated the definition has been inconsistent over time. To paraphrase Chatul I would state that on small systems such as PC's "mass storage" typically has meant storage larger than primary memory  (the FDD was early on described as "mass storage") and that on large systems such as mainframes and servers "mass storage" has typically meant on-line storage larger than secondary storage.  I'm not sure if it has any meaning today - is Cloud Storage mass storage?  The problem will be finding reliable sources for such definitions.  Maybe we just have to state the facts historically Tom94022 (talk) 07:09, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

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Mystery malformed citation
A recent citation

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of an article in ComputerWorld is rendering literally, as though it were in . It's also missing trailing brackets, precedes the punctuation and doesn't have appropriate markup for a newspaper article, but none of those is the cause of the problem. Can anybody see what's wrong?
 * Adding the missing trailing brackets as I did above seems to fix the rendering problem but that is moot since the ref was been removed in a subsequent edit. Tom94022 (talk) 07:51, 4 December 2020 (UTC)