Evolution Of Portable Storage Devices Over The Ages

By Author: Kunal Advani
Total Articles: 4
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Technology has come a long way since one had to store information on devices such as punch cards & paper tapes which were simply pieces of stiff paper containing digital information with storage capacity as little as 100 kb and were sold for thousands of rupees. Then came a leap jump in technology with the introduction of various sizes of floppy disks (from 8” to 5.25” to 3”) invented in 1971 by IBM and enhanced by Sony and others with tenfold storage capacity of up to 1.44Mb. It would only be a matter of time with the advent of optical disks that data storage would turn to lasers. Although very slow and expensive, CD’s drives were for the few and were considered a novelty. With further developments CD drives became popular and affordable especially owing to the era of CD gaming in the early 90’s. With the invention of re-writable CD in 1997, the technology had storage capacity of up to 500 times the floppy disks

Invention of DVD’s succeeded the Compact Disk technology in mid-90 owing to its large storage capacity designed to store high quality movies, hence not only targeting movie fanatics but also ...
... gamers who had to previously install games from multiple CD’s. Owing to storage capacity, transition from Compact disks to Optical Media as storage device was seamless and is still considered to be the most cost effective means of storing large amounts of data.

Arguably one of the most effective, widely used storage device ever invented is the USB flash drive with consistent increase in capacity through the years since its invention, beginning with 64 MB capacity now with capacities to hold data up to 128 GB. The biggest advantage of pen drive technology does not come from its low price point or its portability but from its ability to update a motherboard's BIOS or boot from a USB key that won the heart of power users.

Compact Flash, a storage device invented in mid 90’s by SanDisk is another portable mass storage card still used in many high end best DSLR cameras across India and the world. The format currently used is high density NAND chips with lower costs, better performance and storage capacity than its predecessors Type 1 and Type 2 chips, although Type 2 chip is still widely used in Best Cameras in India and the world.

Portable hard drives came into popularity in the early 2000’s as elegant looking, lighter devices introduced by companies like Transcend, Iomega, Samsung and the like. Portable hard drives have more in common with Internal Hard drives than any other storage device except they are USB powered and can be ported. New age USB 3.0 hard drives come in capacities ranging from 500 GB up to 2 TB.

Solid State Drives is the latest invention in storage technology that seems to have naturally evolved from hard drives. One of the biggest selling points of SSD’s is its high performance coupled with its compatibility with laptops, desktops and servers (given that it can also be used as an internal drive). Solid State Drives have no moving parts hence making it fast and long lasting. The technology has been slow in picking up in the marketplace due to its high cost, but as with any new technology the pricing would eventually plummet giving it advantage over its predecessors and making it apparent successor to portable external drives.

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