Optical media such as CD-RW and DVD-RW are standard storage media.
In addition to internal hard drives that virtually every computer has installed within, there are a number of different computer storage devices such as flash drives, external hard drives, smart cards, re-writable CDs and DVDs and even online "cloud" storage sites. Floppy and ZIP disks are rarely used anymore; the former are too small to hold much in the way of files and the latter have been largely discontinued from use due the prevalence of optical media such as CDs and DVDs.
Flash Drives
Also known as thumb drives because of their size or as USB drives because that's the port they connect to, flash drives are an extremely popular way to store data in a compact and portable fashion. Flash drives range in data capacity up to a whopping one terabyte (1,000GB) as of February 2012.
External Hard Drives
External hard drives are exactly like the hard drive on any computer except they are outside of your computer. They usually connect through a USB port (similar to flash drives), are designed either for desktops or laptops and have a storage capacity of up to 2TB or more. Large companies or other individuals who need secure storage often use technologies that involve combined external hard drives set up in RAID or other hot-swappable, fault-tolerant configurations.
Smart Cards
Smart cards are also known as memory cards. The usage and types of smart cards have evolved over the years from primary usage in laptops to cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Many printers, laptops and other computers come with slots for various types of memory cards; SD cards in particular are quite popular and for the most part top out at about 2GB.
Online Storage
Also called "remote backup," or "cloud storage," online storage sites allow you to store information on a company's servers. SugarSync, Dropbox, IDrive and numerous other sites provide these services for free; more storage space is typically available for a fee.
Re-writable CDs and DVDs
Rewritable CDs and DVDs look exactly like CDs and DVDs you can buy in a store with music and movies on them, except in the case of rewritables you can store information on them. They are often used to store music, text files, photos, and other data. CD rewritables can hold up to about 700MB, DVD rewritables can hold up to about 4.7GB and Blu-ray rewritables, which are starting to become popular at the time of this writing, can hold about 25GB.
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