External Storage Drive History

From the beginning of the personal computer (PC) people have needed outside storage. In the following material they will speak about the beginning of the outside storage (floppy disks) to the current technologies. In the beginning of the PC there were only floppy disk drives that were 1/4" wide. The operating process & applications needed to be loaded in to the floppy drives to run the computer in the early 1980's. The computer hard disk allowed the applications to be loaded in to the computer without needing the floppy drive. In the work of this timeframe people could store their information on these floppy disks & keep it offline to be reloaded in to the computer later.

The original 1/4" floppies held 160KB (kilobytes) of information but quickly improved to 360KB. To put this in to point of view 1KB is about half a page of text. The floppy drives were made from a vinyl like a record in that you had tracks where the information was stored. The 1/4" drive topped out at.2MB (megabytes) but were still contained in the delicate floppy disk that was liable to environmental contamination. The next format to come out was 1/2" floppies. These not only were smaller but they had a plastic case defending them. Though they began holding only 720KB of information, they were soon able to hold.44MB of information & were far simpler to store in cases & off site. By the late 1980s the 1/4" floppy disks were replaced by the 1/2" format.

Hard disk drives continue to shrink with the laptop computer models standardizing on 1/2" form factor. Hard drives inside an exterior enclosure, while around technically for some time, were becoming available in the consumer market in standard formats like USB (Universal Serial Bus), FireWire, & SATA (Serial AT Attachment) though the 2000's. These new formats allowed these enclosures to be transportable with a standardized interface (like USB) allowing you to connect to another process painlessly. USB provides a more generic plug & play capability allowing the process to identify the drive as soon as you connect it. There are some enclosures on the market that can hold multiple drives & even offer RAID (redundant array of cheap disks) capabilities. RAID provides the ability to either mirror your information from hard drive to another or stretch (stripe) the information across the drives you have. What this provides is a failsafe in case you lose a hard disk drive due to failure the computer won't notice any difference in accessing your information as the other hard drives take over.

In the work of the same timeframe in the 1980's the internal hard disk drive was becoming a standard for the PC as well. There is distinct differences between the hard disk storage (think library of information) & memory (RAM - random access memory) & the floppy drive (used to take the information with you). The hard drives started out in 1/4" format storing 5MB (megabytes) of information growing steadily throughout the 1980's up until the Quantum.28GB drive. To put this in to point of view 1GB is about 250 MP3 songs. Unlike floppy disks, hard drives were installed inside the computer. Hard drives continued to progress shrinking their form factor to 1/2" in the 1990's. These hard drives were known as half-height drives. By the 1990's the hard drives were growing quickly beginning around 40GB (gigabytes) of total storage all the way up to today's 3TB (terabytes) drives.

In the beginning the connection was SCSI (tiny computer process interface) but later on it developed in to a USB (universal serial bus) connection. By 1995 SmartMedia had arrived on the scene from Toshiba Corporation. SmartMedia was a tiny (45mm) plastic card with a flash memory module inside allowing 2MB of direct storage but this quickly grew to the 64MB/128MB. These cards were used in digital cameras & other devices allowing the ability to remove the storage & read it on your PC. Today you can find various sizes up to 32GB on a single card. By contrast to older technologies these new devices were far more rugged than the floppy drive & far more transportable. In the work of this same timeframe the DVD (digital video disk) arrived to the market to replace the CD. This format provided.7GB (8.5G double layered) of storage space on the same optical disc format that the CDs were based on. As density increased Blu-Ray DVDs arrived to provide 50GB of storage space with dual layer discs being the most common. Blu-Ray provides the best high density video format available today commercially with 100GB of information being the standard.

Although disk drives remained standardized by form factor (full height or half height) the floppy drive diversified in to a full field of products including today's USB drives. In late 1980 there came a brand spanking new format called CD (compact disk) which offered information stored onto a plastic disc with reflective backing. These CD drives were 1/4" form factor & fit fundamentally in to existing expansion bays in the PC. CDs began storing 680MB of information holding around 74 minutes of music & have topped out at 700MB of information. CDs became the standard format for removable storage & are still widely used today. In the early 1990's Iomega came to market with the Iomega Zip drive. This outside storage device started at 100MB & grew to 750MB densities. It was cartridge based continuing the 1/2" floppy innovation. This new type of storage had different connections to the PC.

Flash forward to today as the hard drives & transportable outside storage have progressed to SSD (Solid State Disk) know-how. This transformed transportable storage allowing for those ubiquitous USB flash drives people carryover around with them. Internal hard drives based on SSD know-how let you make use of SATA to connect the drive internally to your PC or laptop computer. SATA is the common standard for connecting hard drives. These drives are more long lasting & have a lower access time. As new emerging technologies arrive like cloud computing there will be less demand for transportable storage & hard drives. Cloud computing lets you run your application on the net while your information resides elsewhere (the cloud). Make no mistake your information is being stored, not on your hard drive or floppy.