secondary storage

noun, Computers.

storage, as on disk or tape, supplemental to and slower than main storage, not under the direct control of the CPU and generally contained outside it:

Secondary storage for this system is contained on videodisk.

Also called auxiliary storage, external storage, secondary memory.

Examples from the web for secondary storage

The optical disk system is a hierarchical system with primary storage on magnetic disk and secondary storage on the optical disks.
From the secondary crusher, the crushed limestone moves by conveyor onto the secondary storage piles adjacent to the quarry.
With no new storage facilities being constructed, there has been a net loss of secondary storage capacity over the past decade.
The secondary storage value is used for the water-table case when the water table lies within the model cell.

secondary storage in Technology

storage
Any non-volatile storage medium that is not directly accessible to the processor. Memory directly accessible to the processor includes main memory, cache and the CPU registers. Secondary storage includes hard drives, magnetic tape, CD-ROM, DVD drives, floppy disks, punch cards and paper tape.
Secondary storage devices are usually accessed via some kind of controller. This contains registers that can be directly accessed by the CPU like main memory ("memory mapped"). Reading and writing these registers can cause the device to perform actions like reading a block of data off a disk or rewinding a tape. See also DMA.
Programs and data stored in secondary storage must first be loaded into main memory before the processor can use them.
(1997-11-05)