There are two types of digital information: input and output data. Users provide input data. Computers provide the output. But the computer’s CPU cannot calculate anything or create output without user input.

Users can enter input directly into the computer. However, at the beginning of the computer era, they found that constant manual data entry was time and energy prohibitive. One short-term solution is computer memory, also known as random access memory (RAM). But its storage capacity and memory retention are limited. As the name suggests, permanent memory (ROM) is data that can only be read, but not necessarily edited. They control the basic functions of the computer.

Although advances have been made in computer memory with dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), they are still limited by cost, space, and memory retention. When a computer is turned off, the RAM’s ability to store data is turned off. The solution? Data storage.

With storage space, users can store data on the device. And if the computer shuts down, the data is preserved. And instead of manually entering data into the computer, users can instruct the computer to retrieve data from storage devices. Computers can read input data from different sources as needed, and then create and store output data in the same sources or other storage locations. Users can also share data storage with others.

Today, organizations and users need data storage to meet today’s high-level computing needs, such as big data projects, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The other side of the requirement for huge amounts of data storage is to protect against data loss due to disaster, failure or fraud. Therefore, to avoid data loss, organizations can also use data warehouse as a backup solution.

How data storage works
Simply put, modern computers or terminals connect to storage devices directly or via a network. Users instruct computers to access data from and store data on these storage devices. However, at a fundamental level, there are two bases for storing data: the form in which the data is received and the devices on which the data is recorded and stored.