Document storage

• A: Drive
• C: Drive
• CougarNet mail storage
• CD-ROM
• DVD-ROM
• Home directory - H: Drive
• Jump drives
• Saving tips

A: Drive

The floppy disc is the oldest form of portable data storage medium still in use today. Also called a “3.5-inch diskette,” it can store up to 1.44 megabytes (MB) of data.

CAUTION: Because of the potential unreliability of diskettes, documents saved on them should also be saved to another storage location, such as a user’s H: Drive.

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C: Drive

A hard drive is the main storage device located inside a computer. It stores the operating system (Windows), other software and data files. The common storage capacity is 40 gigabytes minimum.

CAUTION: Documents cannot be saved on a CSU lab computer’s hard drive. Documents are deleted when the computer is turned off or restarted. Documents should be saved to a diskette, CD (if available) or user’s H: drive.

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CD-ROM

A type of technology that stores information on a compact disc, up to 700 MB. A single CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) has the storage capacity of 500 floppy disks, enough memory to store about 300,000 text pages.

To read a CD, you need a CD-ROM player. To copy files to a CD, you need a CD-Rom Burner.

CD-ROM drive

Reads compact discs in the form of audio or data.

CD-Rom burner

A device that allows you to save data to a CD-ROM disc. There are two types of CD-ROM discs, a CD-R, which can only write to a CD once, and a CDRW, for rewritable CDs which can be erased and rewritten to.

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DVD-ROM

Similar to a CD-ROM drive, a DVD drive reads CDs, CD-ROMs, and the newer DVDs. DVD's advantage over CDs is that it holds many times the capacity of a single CD. DVDs can also hold full-length movies and can be used double-sided for extra storage. One of the best features of DVD drives is that they are backward compatible with CD-ROMS, meaning they can play old CD-ROMS as well as new DVD-ROMs.

DVD burner

A piece of hardware (i.e. a physical device) that creates a DVD disc using a laser that “burns” the information onto the disc.

Older DVD recordable drives were available in a couple of different formats - DVD-R or DVD+R with a RW version of each.

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