This topic accounts for approximately 5% of your exam marks.
stable
Rare
Stable5%
RAM vs ROM and primary vs secondary storage comparisons appear regularly.
is that lives on remote servers owned by a third-party provider, accessed over the internet rather than from a local drive.
Files saved to "the cloud" are actually written to physical drives (usually HDDs or SSDs) in a data centre. The user never sees or touches those drives directly; the cloud provider handles the hardware, backups, security and maintenance.
Common cloud storage services: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud, Amazon S3.
Advantages of cloud storage
Reach your files from anywhere that has an internet connection, on any compatible device.
Automatic backups: the provider replicates each file to several physical drives, so a single drive failure does not lose data.
Easy sharing and collaboration: multiple users can read and edit the same file at once.
Effectively unlimited capacity (subject to subscription).
No need to buy or maintain local storage hardware.
One data centre is more energy-efficient than millions of personal drives.
Disadvantages of cloud storage
Needs a working internet connection; if the link drops, the files become unreachable.
Ongoing cost: cloud storage is usually a monthly or annual subscription. For large datasets, this can be expensive over time.
Transferring large amounts of data is slow and may use a lot of bandwidth.
Privacy and security concerns: data sits on someone else's servers; if the provider is hacked, files could be exposed.
Legal responsibility for personal data still sits with the user, even though the data lives at the provider.
No control over physical security: the user must trust the provider's procedures.