BENEFITS
           
           Picture, if you can, how many filing cabinet drawers would
       be required to hold the millions of files of, say the tax records
       kept by the Internal Revenue Service.  The record storage rooms
       would have to be enormous.   Computers on the other hand permit
       storage on tape or disk in extremely compressed form.  Storage
       capacity is unquestionably one of the most valueable assets of the
       computer.
         
           Take a simple diskette for example, it can hold the
       equivalent of 500 printed pages and an optical disk(CD-ROM) can 
       hold approximately the equivalent of 400 books.

VARIOUS MEDIA

           There are two main catagories for secondary storage media
       Magnetic and Optical.
      
     MAGNETIC STORAGE MEDIA
          Included in this catagory are Diskettes, Hard Disks and 
       Magnetic Tapes.  Diskettes range from a common Personal
       computers floppy disk (1.44MB of storage) to larger capacity
       disks such as those used with ZIP Drives (100MB of storage). 
       Hard disks store data much the same way as diskettes, however,
       have much more capacity (3GB and up of storage).  Finally there
       are Magnetic Tapes.  These come in various types.  Some look 
       like an ordinary audio tape you would use for recording music
       while others come on reels like film from an old movie
       projector.
       
     OPTICAL STORAGE MEDIA
          In this catagory is the CD-ROM.  The cd-rom is a little
       different from the other types of storage media we have talked
       about so far.  The difference is that data can only be read and        
       not written on cd-roms hence the name CD-ROM (Read Only Memory).        
       The cd-rom seems to have replaced other forms of media, such as       
       the diskette in areas such as software distrobution. This is due        
       the cd-roms gargantuan storage capacity- up to 660MB or over 400
       3 1/2" diskettes.