data medium

Data carriers, also known as information carriers, memories or media, are the physical carrier substances on which data is recorded.

The oldest storage media used paper and cardboard or similar as carrier substances for punched cards, punched tapes, plain text documents, marker documents and labels. Further developments include magnetic storage substances used for core memories, hard disks, floppy disks, magnetic tapes, magnetic disks and magnetic cards, optical storage media that use lasers to burn the data into a shiny silver information layer, as in the case of the image disk, the compact disc( CD) and the DVD and their variants, and semiconductor-based storage media. These include permanently storing semiconductor memories such as solid-state drives, ROM memory, flash memory and memory cards.