The primitive man used a skull or a stone to mark a place. This was the beginning of storing information. Shapes were formed using clay and wax. Hard surfaces such as stone, wood, glass or metal were used to carve information mostly in the form of images and pictures. Heat-branding of livestock and the use of paint, ink or chalk followed. It took almost 3 million years to learn marking on a skin, papyrus or paper. It took only 300 years to reach a modest age of perfecting the data storage devices that we are using today.
At present, we have secure digital (SD) non-volatile memory cards that are used in portable devices such as cell phones, digital cameras, GPS trackers and tablet computers. There are over 500 brands and more than 1000 models available in the market. Lexar released the mammoth 128 GB capacity micro-size SDXC card based on the NAND flash technology. Compared to NOR-style of addressing memory by page, this technology uses several floating-gate transistors in series so that it addresses memory by page, word and bit.
The punch card (1725) was the first memory card used to control looms in textile factories. It had specific punched holes which directed the machine to create a particular pattern. The Hollerith Punch Card (1890) was faster and easier to use. The Punch Tape (1937) used roll of ribbon paper to hold and large process punched data. The Drum memory (1950) had a similar configuration, but on a rotating drum. The first 8 inch floppy drive (1969) stored 79.7 kilobytes of data. Cassette Tapes (1972) could store and reproduce more than 100 kilobytes. The 3.5 inch floppy drives (1976) had a storage capacity of 1.44.mB. Philips and Sony marketed 700 MB storage capacity compact discs (1979). The Zip drives (1994) had 750 MB capacity and the Jazz disks (1995) had 1 GB capacity. The first generation USB Flash drive (2000) had a 8 MB storage capacity. The thin and small SanDisk (SD) cards (2000) with 32mB storage became very popular with handheld devices. Now we are in the Cloud storage (2011) era where a consumer can connect from any internet device and reap the benefit of limitless storage.
As the saying goes, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” One shall prefer a hard storage device for some more time.
The breaking news is that Hitachi has created a 2 square centimeter quartz data storage piece that can endure harsh conditions and stay good for a few hundred million years.
At present, the amazing data storage capacity of DNA is under the scanner of the researchers. This “apocalypse-proof” dream would survive any global disaster and open ocean of information for the future evolution. We may soon move from the size of molecular compounds to a single molecule. Can the atomic data storage device be far behind?