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The Evolution of Portable Storage Devices
by Dave Matthews
Removable storage media has been in existence almost as long as the computer itself. Many of you may be able to remember back to when magnetic tape was used for storage, just like that which was used by audio cassettes. If we go back even further we remember back to the days when even paper punch cards were used to store data. We have come a long way since then and now storage devices are capable of retaining gigabytes of data on a remarkably small device.
There are lots of reasons as to why removable storage devices are extremely useful. They can be used to store software, make back up copies of vital information, an easy way of transporting data between machines, providing information for someone else and of course backing up important information. The storage devices that can be purchases these days offer a dizzying array of options from the old stle diskettes which can hold up to 1.44MB of data to portable hard drives which can hold hundreds of gigabytes of information.
Portable storage media falls into 3 categories: magnetic storage, optical storage and solid-state storage. The most memorable form of magnetic storage was tgat used in the 1.44MB floppy diskettes. The magnetic device is coated with a ferromagnetic iron oxide. Electromagnets in the disk drive read and write data using electromagnets.
Magnetic storage technology has improved greatly over the years. A large leap forward was made with the introduction of Zip drives as a much higher capacity alternative to the floppy disk. The coating on a zip disk is of much higher quality. This means that the head on a zip drive used to read and write data to the disk can be much smaller than that found on a floppy drive. In fact the many improvements made on a zip disk mean that it can hold hundreds of megabytes of data on one disk.
Removable solid state devices such as that used in digital cameras and PDAs makes use of flash memory which consists of no moving parts whatsoever. Flash memory stores data with the use of grids of transistors where information is held in the form of 1's and zeros. Flash memory uses in build circuit wiring and works significantly faster than traditional electrically erasable memory.
Flash memory devices such as SmartMedia or CompactFlash cards are the most common form of storage media used today. CompactFlash consists of a small circuit board of flash memory chips and one dedicated controller chip which is all encased in a rugged case. The increased thickness of this card obviously allows for greater storage capacity.
It seems that removable storage has the potential to evolve in many different directions. Magnetic media should continue to exist in both cartridge form as well as hard drives that exist in the gigabyte range in terms of storage. There may also be a trend towards the use of optical storage devices whose drives are about the size of a matchbox and make use of tiny discs which can hold around 500MB of information. Solid state devices like CompactFlash cards will continue to increase in capacity whilst remaining the same size where as USB sticks may get smaller and smaller.
About the Author
Dave Matthews is writing on behalf of Universal Smart Cards, a leading retailer of smart card readers.
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