In this chapter, we took the time to cover some of the basics about non-volatile storage media, which stores data even after there is no power supplied to the medium. Non-volatile media includes different types of hard disk drives, 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 by 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 had a look at various filesystems associated with various operating systems, and saw that the smallest allocation of data is called a Cluster, in which can reside 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...