Application example

Question

an example of an application that requires some form of storage and its most appropriate storage device.

Answer 1

I'm not too sure what this question is asking, but pretty much all applications require storage.

From the smallest, you've got something like Spotify on your phone. You need to download music to disk (it's not actually a disk, but custom solid-state disk--similarish to a SD card) on your phone for offline listening, and it will be downloaded to the disk/filesystem on an iPhone, and pulled into memory when queued/playing.

For the biggest, Netflix has to store it's colossal database of movies & films somewhere. They may use a cloud-based solution (or their own), stored on disk on hundreds of different machines in dozens of datacenters around the world.

Going back to Spotify, you've got multiple tiers of storage as a song makes it's way to your ears. The song is stored in Spotify's cloud, then a request comes to copy it to your phone. It goes from cloud storage, through the internet, to the local storage on your phone. And that's not even the fullest extent! When the artist records the song in the studio, it's stored on their laptop's disk storage before being transmitted to spotify's storage, and then ultimately to your phone's storage.

You can take this further. Digital Camera? It's running a "camera" application and stores photos on disk (SD card). ATM Machine? It's running a java/android application, storing your transactions on disk (Probably a SSD? I don't know).