Let’s Show Some Love To Harddrives
Intro
Hello all! Here’s a short rumination I’ve had recently. I’ve been thinking about storage a lot recently. I know, very weird and random subject, but as someone who was alive during the 90s and seeing the maturation of digital storage, I’ve honestly been really shocked at the progress.
Read & Write
As I said before, I grew up in the 90s and things were different. Back in the day (I’m very happy I can use this now), one of the primary ways to store data were floppy disks (yes I remember). CDs, cassettes, and VHS tapes were some of the other ways to store things. Harddrives for computers also had really tiny storage sizes. By tiny, I means you would be lucky to have 32 gigs of storage for a desktop class computer. For reference, these weren’t like the tiny flash memory/ SSD cards found in phones today. These were disk drives. They were large and contained actual, well, discs that would spin. For perspective, disk drives are still common these days for desktops, but they have FAR more storage capacity, and come in different types: SSDs, hybrid disk/SSD, and Disk Drives. You can buy a 1 terabyte harddrive today for under $100, and that’s just insane to me.
That’s just for desktop storage. Back in the 2000s when usb flash drives started emerging, they too were really small. I remember having drives as small as 500mb or 1 Gb. Over time they too got bigger. About halfway through college, you could get 16gigs for about 35 bucks or so. It really is great to see the amount of storage get higher in capacity and smaller in size. It would have definitely come in handy for some friends I had back in the day. When portable drives were disk based, I’ve had friends lose months and months of work due to disk failure. You hate to see it, but with SSDs and flash drives, you can store a massive amount of data for cheap and it’s really reliable. Throw in cloud services, and you should never have to worry about losing your data again. Another nice little bonus is that many devices, both portable and stationary now support USB-C, which gives you more options as far as collecting your data now (instead of uploading to the cloud on some phones for example).
Outro
The tech is awesome, and although many are moving to cloud storage (justifiably), there’s still an incentive to physical access to your own data: for safety, security, additional backups, and reliability. I’m really excited with how far we’ve come, and can’t wait to see new storage mediums as they emerge in the future (DNA storage anyone?). That’s all for now!
