By: A.Noton
Submitted: 2011-11-30 17:26:35 | Word Count: 548
For the duration of this piece we will be carefully taking a deeper look at the rich history of data storage. We are going to cover all of the popular forms of storage that have been available to people, throughout the history of the computer. Some younger people might not be very familiar with the earliest forms of technology that we'll be discussing, but that's the point of reading this.
The first decided way to store computer data effectively was through the use of density disks. These were also commonly referred to as floppy disc's. The first floppies were actually very large, they were eight inches in size and introduced to the world in the early seventies. By the late seventies they grew in popularity and could store just under eighty kilobytes on one disk!
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The first type of floppy disc's that grew in popularity with the creation of the personal computer were the five and a quarter sized disc's. These disc's were often used to store the operating system as well because hard drives were not as available and far too expensive for most consumers. Some of these disc's could store of to three hundred and sixty kilobytes. We weren't yet up to half a megabyte yet.
The third kind of floppy was the last type of popular density disc before the technology fell out of use because of the invention of more efficient mediums. This floppy was three and a quarter inches in size and was only used to store some software as well as personal files because hard drives had become affordable by this point and we very commonly being used for not only operating systems but storing other things as well.
The hard drives of the past were very crude compared to the type of hard disc's that we have become accustomed to today. They only held a fraction of the information that today's hard drive could store. A great deal of computers in the mid nineties had hard drives that were under the four gigabyte range. Optical disc media, like Cd's became more popular for storing software than floppies.
Today, hard drives are capable of storing thousands of gigabytes as a time and come in external, "plug and play" models. The external hard drive kind of evolved into a new form of storage in a class all of it's own. We are of course talking about the very tiny flash drives that are seen so commonly hanging from the key chains of college students the entire world over.
Today, optical disc technology for the home is so common, that we can read and write on all popular forms of optical style media. People very commonly store data to not only Cd's, but to DVDs and Blu-ray disc's as well. A blu-ray disc can store up to fifty gigabytes on one dual layer disc. Web networks often utilize large servers as a way of storing files that they consider to be important.
By now, you should have a good idea of how very rich the history of data storage is. The next time you are holding a blu-ray disc that has fifty gigabytes of data stored on it, consider that the earliest density style disc's couldn't even hold a tenth of a single megabyte.
Author Resource:-
Tape Guard specializes in the secure and certified digital data storage such as hard drives, tapes and other digital media. http://www.tapeguard.net
