The Pillars of Storage

Here we have listed the products that revolutionized the storage media and which made it possible today for you store terabytes of data.

The Hard Disk

Hard Disk Drive was first introduced by IBM in 1953, which was then known as Random Access Storage. Its commercialization began in 1956 when IBM came up with first magnetic hard disk for data storage called IBM 350 integrated in IBM RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control). It consisted of fifty 24-inch disks to store 5 megabytes of data and its usage was confined to mainframes in air-conditioned room in enterprises. Later in 1973 IBM introduced IBM 3340 Winchester disk drive. It came in two in two modules, one is 35 MB and another is 70 MB. But in 1980 this megabyte barrier was broken when IBM came up with the first gigabyte drive called IBM 3380 and it was the size of a refrigerator. The hard disk so far were huge in size but it was reduced when Seagate introduced a 5.25 inch hard disk drive, with a capacity of 5 megabytes. With the advent of laptops in the 1990s the size of the hard disk started reducing. In 1991 2.5 inch hard disk with the capacity of 100 MB hard drive was introduced but HP further reduced the size of the disk and came up with 1.3 inch hard disk, HP 3013, with a capacity of 20 MB. Since then there was no turning back. The size of the hard disk was decreasing and the capacity is increasing.

Optical Drives

The first analog format laser disk was introduced in 1972 by the name Laservision but the major breakthrough was CD, which was introduced by Sony in 1982. Primarily it was used to play the music not for storage. But that day was also not far. In 1985 CD-ROM was introduced which was readable in a computer. CDs somewhat replaced the audio cassette players, since the sound recorded in CDs were more clear as compared to audio cassettes. In 1990 Sony along with Phillips introduced the recordable CDs. It impacted the storage devices like floppy disk. Since floppy disk had the capacity of 1.44 MB, CDs had a capacity of 700 MB or 80 min audio. In 1996 CD was over shadowed by DVD and was initially used for audio or video. It was in 1997 that DVD-R was introduced. The reason behind its success was its capacity which was 4.7 GB. Later Blue-Ray format was also introduced with capacity upto 128 GB and an excellent video quality. But today optical disks are being replaced by other media like downloading, cloud storage or flash drives.

Flash Memory

Before the USB flash drive it was difficult to move the data from one system to another and that too at different locations. Though there were floppies available but when it came to files of large sizes then floppy was not the best option. Also CDs were mainly used for music and videos. But the introduction of USB 1.0 in 1996 opened the gate for the data transfer and it was in 2000 that USB flash drive, of size 8 MB, was sold commercially. The popularity also increased because of the reduced size of these flash drives and also they were more reliable than CDs and floppies. In 2003 USB 2.0 was introduced. This also brought a significant change in USB drives. The data transfer rate has increased from 1.5MB/s to 30 MB/s. The capacity has also increased. Today you can get flash drive upto 256 GB of space. USB flash drives are known by different names like thumb drive and pen drive. As far as creator of USB Flash Drive is concerned there were certain controversies related to it. There were different companies who claimed to introduce flash drive but today there are many companies who are manufacturing this common storage device.