storage

Persistent retention of data beyond power cycles.

Persistent retention of data beyond power cycles.

Ranges from embedded flash on MCU platforms to enterprise SAN arrays.

Two dominant technologies: magnetic platters (HDD) and NAND flash (SSD)

A cache layer absorbs hot reads and coalesces writes before they hit the slower medium.

The OS abstracts raw blocks into file systems, and DMA moves bulk data without burdening the CPU