WHERE DOES MY DATA GETS STORED?

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STORAGE DEVICES

INTRODUCTION:

            Every one of us stores data ,Almost every one right from mobile phone users to big MNC's having tons of data on their servers , let's see how far we have developed in Magnetic data storage devices and various types of storage devices available now.

FIRST GENERATION OF STORAGE DEVICES:

            First need of a storage devices or a storage platform started even before the computers were developed, PUNCHED TAPES  were used by many looming industries to follow some patterns in their loomed products.The punched holes originally represented a “sequence of instructions” for pieces of equipment, such as textile looms and player pianos. The holes acted as on/off switches. Basile Bouchon developed the punch card as a control for looms in 1725.

ROLE OF PUNCHED CARDS:

       The punched cards had a very long run in the industry , many machines used punched cards as a code of instructions to their machines,Even after the Advent of Charles Babbage and his Analytical engine a primitive calculator with moving parts, that used punch cards for instructions and responses.Charles Babbage came with his Analytical engine only in 1837 , Punched tapes were already 100 years old at that time.

USAGE OF PUNCHED CARDS AS STORAGE:

Herman Hollerith developed this idea, and made the Analytical Engine a reality by having the holes represent, not just a sequence of instructions, but stored data the machine could read.

Even in older NC machine that is the father of the present CNC machine used punched tapes,this shows how much influence the punched tapes had in the industry.

 Punched tapes had very less data storage capacity,to be more clear 28 billon of them will need to equal a normal 2 Terabyte Hard disk now, 

THE ENTRY OF MAGNETIC STORAGE:

DRUM MEMORY

          Drum memory a large magnetic drum which we can see in older IBM machines ,they are very huge , occupying almost half the room , In a 1956 IBM 50ft  tall which had a capacity of 4MB storage.Then came the CRT tubes .Which we often see in old tv's they are also big but relatively small when compared to the drum,Then CORE memory cam into usage, They are used as ram for older computers.

FLOPPY:

   Floppy disk came in 1971 which almost changed the industry ,with its great portability .They tend to flop if you wave it so the name floppy is given.It had various form factors ,The 8 inch,5 1/4 inch and 3 1/2 inch . They stored data upto 1.44 MB that is a huge number for a removable disk that time ,The Floppy ruled the portable storage market for almost two decades.

CD's AND FLASH STORAGE:

            Almost every one of us would have used this one in our life time ,The CD (compact disc), a

digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982.Firstly they only stored audio recordings,Later they were used as a storage media.Standard CD's have a diameter of 120 millimeters  (4.7 inch) and can hold up to about 80 minutes of uncompressed audio or about 700 MB of data.

 A survey showed, In 2004, worldwide sales of audio CD's, CD-ROM's and CD-R's reached about 30 billion discs. By 2007, 200 billion CD's had been sold worldwide.That shows its usage in storage and multimedia markets.

USB STORAGE:

          A very common type of storage media used nowadays, The usb flash drives are vey faster and small when compared to the cd's they also reliable and very solid when compared to CD's.They also had high capacities,We can even see Terabytes of storage available on them nowadays.

MAINSTREAM STORAGE DEVICES:

HDD:

         The above mentioned are some portable storage devices,What does our computer uses?.Most of the computers now uses a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) .It consist of an magnetic disk rotating inside it ,In which data is stored . It is purely mechanical the disk must rotate to read the data stored in it .

        The HDD's are very cheap , And also they are reliable for long term storage.The main disadvantage is that due to its mechanical rotation it is slow that some SSD's and it will wear out after long term usage .

SSD:

        Then came the SSD's (Solid State Drives) they are faster and they are made up of NAND capacitors similar to a flash storage device .They are also small because they don't have any disk rotation as in HDD's .They are used in most of the modern Computers and Laptops ,But they are costly than HDD and offer only less writing cycles .The NAND capacitors will worn out after a numerous writing cycle.NOTE: Reading a data wont cause the capacitors to wear out but repeated deletion and addition of data will cause wear.

SSHD:

They are almost a combination of HDD and SSD . SSHD has both a rotating disk and a NAND flash drive .A special controller controls both the NAND flash and Hard disk.A special frimware decides which type of data to store in the SSD and which to store in HDD. The most frequently accessed data is stored in the flash memory.Over the time it automatically chooses which data to be stored where.One disadvantage is that they offer a very little amount of flash storage.

M.2 & NVME :

       Even though the SSD's are faster they are still connected with the SATA interface.Which only offers speed upto 6GB\sec.The SATA express which allowed speed upto 16GBs/sec but it still had cables.Then M.2 came into the game .It directly connects with the motherboards PCI express slot ,It also doesnt need a separate power supply.But make sure that which type your Mother board supports.some will have various connectors for M.2 and Nvme (Non Volatile Memory Express).

The Dimensions also vary from manufacture to manufacture make sure your cabin dimensions before you buy.  

CONCLUSION:

              The Data storage technology had a enormous growth in the past two decades in the early 2000's 4gigs of data seemed a lot but nowadays a normal mobile phone has 10 times of it .Thanks to the growing semiconducting industries that made this possible.In future we can see memory storage on graphene. Which will totally change the portable storage industry.Mention your thoughts about future.