The Evolution of Secondary Storage

From the past lecture, our lecturer had mentioned about secondary storage devices in Malaysia for the past decade. She had said that during her university life, they needed a lot of diskette to submitted one assignment. It had arouse my curiosity about the evolution of secondary storage devices.

Therefore, i did a little bit of research and below is my findings.

History of secondary storage is quite interesting, with each generation, it gets better, faster, secure, reliable and smaller it size and always expanding the storage capacity.

The first external storage device was paper punch card. It used paper card with holes as data. A hole means zero, and no hole was one. Printer that time were used to punch the output for storage.

Paper was quickly out-dated once the Floppy Drive (8'') started to be used for storage. It became popular as it was more robust and handy than the paper roll, and could store more data.

The advancement of floppy drive with the 3.5'' that is small and sturdy enough to carry in the pocket. This floppy drive even had cover for the area that is use for reading. The purpose is to protect it from dust.

The first released of Zip Drive was capable of holding 100MB of data. Compare to floppy Drive, this technology were more quality and superior which needs specialized drives for reading and writing on the media. It became a good backup drive.

Flash drive also known as pen drive is the next revolution in secondary portable storage device. The main attraction was capable of being used on any computer equipped with USB port. So now virtually nothing more is needed for this drive to work if you have a computer with USB port.

Card media (SD/MMC/MS) is a stamp sized media that became popular from portable devices like cameras and phones. Media started shrinking and its capacity always increasing. It uses the same technology as the USB drive internally, only the interface is differing in order for it to be used by various devices like camera and mobile phones. Now days Card Reader for these type of media are getting shipped as a standard accessory from leading Computer manufacturers.