The specific physical substrate upon which data is recorded. This includes the magnetic coating on a hard drive platter, the floating-gate transistors in a NAND flash chip, or the reflective layer on a Blu-ray disc. It is the passive element acted upon by the active components of a storage device.
Heard on the job
The forensic team extracts the raw storage medium from shattered drives to read the platters directly.
Also heard as
- media
Do not mix it up with
- Storage device: The medium is just the material holding the bits; the device includes the medium plus the controller and read/write heads.