I realize I’m putting myself out there as a computer geek with this post, so for those of you not inclined to talk megs and gigs, I apologize. Over the past 20 years I’ve relied on a great many forms of saving digital work. The true 5.25″ ‘floppy’ disk dates back to my junior year in high school and I’m glad to say that’s where it ended. Entrusting anything that flimsy to hold your essential files seemed far too risky. I would equate it to stuffing a vinyl 45 in your backpack with a bunch of heavy text books.
Things got some better with the 3.5″ floppy diskette. It was no longer floppy and a lot smaller plus a double density disk could hold up to ten times the data. I still have a ten-pack of floppies that I bought in college for one of my classes. They were obsolete before I got a chance to use them all.
My foray into the world of graphics required a need for more robust storage. One of the earliest forms I recall was something known as the SyQuest disk. You needed a special drive that actually had to ramp up speed before the disk was read. The clear case and size made it seem like an 8-track after dealing with floppy disks for so long. They weren’t reliable and from time to time you lost information.
The successor to the SyQuest was the Magneto Optical disk. These looked like two floppy diskettes sandwiched on top of each other but again, required special drives. Offering sizes up to 640MB these little wonders were a mainstay for temporary data storage. Not unlike the SyQuest, these too, began to offer spotty performance and after losing some really big jobs we abandoned them all together.
Iomega offered their own brand of MO disk which was highly successful. So much so, that every computer began offering an internal zip drive as a standard feature. They were certainly more reliable than their predecessors and I found myself having to upgrade to a 750 MB drive to keep up with some of my clients. Unfortunately, the days of zip were numbered as well.
With CD storage still a standard, the CD-RW became more popular as the drives came down in price. Soon computers offered CD-RW drives as standard features. Once DVDs hit the market, the appeal of CDs wore thin. With 4.7 GB of storage in the same physical size, how could one go wrong. One of my early Macs had a special DVD-RW drive that would burn rewritable DVDs. Though expensive, they were a great way to economize the amount of space needed to store data.
The USB thumb drives are the latest craze in small, portable rewritable data storage. I remember when a 2 GB USB thumb drive cost $180 (I once had a 2 GB hard drive computer back in ’97 and thought it was HUGE!). Now you can get a 16 GB drive for $45!
I wonder what the future of data storage will bring. All I know is if it gets any smaller we won’t be able to see it to plug it in!