Minecraft wiki entry for Redstone_computers, associated text: Third and last, is a tertiary memory, which requires a lot of time to read/write but can hold massive amounts of information at the expense of speed. Real-world tertiary storage use a mechanism of mounting the memory which takes about a minute for each drive. This is used for archival purposes and for memory which is rarely used. In Minecraft, a system where shulker boxes are used and block in the shulker boxes must be sorted out by a sorting system to represent a form of data. This can also be used to create removable storage. The read/write speed is fairly slow due to the massive amount of comparators and a lot of time is required. The aforementioned mods could speed up tick rate and eliminate this problem, however. This is used for storing long-term data that needed to be loaded at the beginning of a program or rarely due to its poor read/write speed and large capacity. This is the equivalent of a real computer's hard disk or solid-state drive.