The Evolution Of Storage

We’re telling the story of storage…
Similar to the computers that create and use them, storage devices have come a long way over the last fifty years. From punch cards to cloud hosting, there have been several distinct generations of data storage – and each has its own place in technology folklore.
Back when van-sized computers needed a team of engineers to operate them, punch cards or tape provided a simple method of binary data storage. This was quickly superseded by the magnetic spools of tape pioneered by IBM which increased storage capacity by an order of magnitude compared to punch cards. Huge reel-to-reel tape decks became a common sight in laboratories and university campuses, although these gradually scaled down as data compression increased.
The advent of compact cassettes in the 1970s would underpin the next decade’s explosion in home computing, with a standard C30 tape often sufficient for hosting games and programs for the eight-bit computers of the time. By this stage, computers were also appearing in offices in vast numbers; commercial devices generally relied on eight-inch floppy disks whose name reflected their flexible and fragile form. Eventually they were replaced by a smaller 5.25-inch disk in the early 1980s, which were themselves usurped by rigid 3.5-inch disks. Typically offering 1.44MB of storage their magnetic data was shielded by sliding metal covers and spindles for added durability. With compact disks still largely the preserve of music systems and online file transfers only found in local area networks, billions of floppy disks entered circulation around the world.
As portable media devices diminished in size and grew in capacity, internal data platforms were doing the same. Many computers had no internal storage other than short-term random access memory [RAM], which was typically measured in kilobytes compared to today’s gigabytes. IBM pioneered both fixed and removable hard drives, although its first 1GB hard drive (released in 1980) weighed 550 pounds and cost tens of thousands of dollars. The 1986 arrival of Small Computer System Interface technology enabled manufacturers to make hard drives small enough to fit inside Apple’s brand-new Mac Plus. Access speeds and storage sizes increased throughout the 1990s as device dimensions continued to shrink, and the evolutionary process has continued to the present day. A modern hard drive bears a strong physical resemblance to one from twenty years ago, despite its incomparable storage volumes and access speeds.
Domestic computers typically rely on a disk-and-spindle mechanism for their internal hard drives, but the arrival of flash storage and memory cards advanced portable data access far beyond the 90s era of CD and DVD-based devices. It’s now possible to squeeze 64 gigabytes of information onto a two-centimetre flash drive, with rapid USB transfer rates and impressive reliability thanks to the absence of moving parts. Modern domestic computers regularly come with one terabyte hard drives, and even a mid-range smartphone will contain gigabytes of internal storage that can sometimes be expanded with tiny removable memory cards.
However, despite the quantum leaps in compression ratios and access speeds for optical and flash devices, data storage is increasingly moving online. It may be an unintentional nod to yesteryear but huge hard drive facilities are being hosted in warehouses to store billions of personal and corporate documents. Cloud storage is often provided free as part of email accounts or other hosting packages, with unlimited access from anywhere in the world. While many people have legitimate concerns about the security of material hosted in this way, the ability to view files and access programs on any internet-enabled device represents the latest evolution in how we access data. It seems this decade is likely to go down in history as the age of cloud storage.

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