Mass Storage Systems
Secondary storage is essentially an electronic closet, a place where you put information that you don't want to constantly hold in your hands but that you don't want to throw away, either. As with the straw hats, squash rackets, wallpaper tailings, and all the rest of your dimly remembered possessions that pile up out of sight behind the closet door, retrieving a particular item from mass storage can take longer than when you have what you want at hand.
Access
Mass storage takes two forms: online storage, which is instantly accessible by your microprocessor's commands, and offline storage, which requires some extra, possibly human, intervention (such as you sliding a cartridge into a drive) for your system to get the bytes ...
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