Essays on Access Time

Advantages and Disadvantages of Magnetic, Optical, and Solid State Storage Devices

Magnetic storage is the oldest storage technology and is used in hard disks that are the primary storage device in most computers. The storage devices store data by assigning a magnetic charge to metal that is then processed and converted into ones and zeros by a read head (Burd, 2010). Magnetic storage devices have the advantages of having very large storage capacities, and very fast access to data because they allow direct random access to any part of the device. However, the devices have slow transfer rates, especially when writing. Durability is also an issue with the devices as ...

Computer Architecture:

The Von Neumann Computer architecture and its importance: The Von Neumann computer architecture model was first described in a paper by Burks, John Von Neumann and Goldstein in 1946. The computer comprised a CPU, memory and I/O devices with a single set of buses connecting the CPU to memory. In this architecture, the program is stored in memory, and the processor fetches an instruction at a time from the memory and executes it. When the processor is reading data values from memory, it is unable to fetch the next execution instruction till data reading is complete. This situation where data and program ...

Part 1

I would choose to implement a database rather than a file system because a database has more capabilities than a file system. For one, a database allows a search to be performed based on the file’s metadata. On the other hand, the user must know the path of a file’s location when searching for a file in a file system. A database allows for the data to be filtered and sorted in a number of ways, which is not possible with a file system. In addition, a database system comes with data backup and redundancy features. Creating backups and checking for redundancy need to be performed manually in file ...