A Brief History of External Storage Devices - From the Floppy Disk to the Hard Drive

From the very beginning of the personal computer (PC) people have needed external storage. In the following material we will discuss the beginning of the external storage (floppy disks) to the current technologies. In the beginning of the PC there were only floppy disk drives that were 5 1/4" wide. The operating system and applications needed to be loaded into the floppy drives just to run the computer in the early 1980's. The computer hard disk allowed the applications to be loaded into the computer without needing the floppy drive. During this timeframe people could store their information on these floppy disks and keep it offline to be reloaded into the computer later.

The original 5 1/4" floppies held 160KB (kilobytes) of data but quickly improved to 360KB. To put this into perspective 1KB is about half a page of text. The floppy drives were made from a vinyl like a record in that you had tracks where the data was stored. The 5 1/4" drive topped out at 1.2MB (megabytes) but were still contained in the fragile floppy disk that was prone to environmental contamination. The next format to come out were 3 1/2" floppies. These not only were smaller but they had a plastic case protecting them. Though they began holding only 720KB of data, they were soon able to hold 1.44MB of data and were far easier to store in cases and off site. By the late 1980s the 5 1/4" floppy disks were replaced by the 3 1/2" format.

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During the same timeframe in the 1980's the internal hard disk drive was becoming a standard for the PC as well. There are distinct differences between the hard disk storage (think library of information) and memory (RAM - random access memory) and the floppy drive (used to take the information with you). The hard drives started out in 5 1/4" format storing 5MB (megabytes) of data growing steadily throughout the 1980's up until the Quantum 1.28GB drive. To put this into perspective 1GB is about 250 MP3 songs. Unlike floppy disks, hard drives were installed inside the computer. Hard drives continued to progress shrinking their form factor to 3 1/2" in the 1990's. These hard drives were referred to as half-height drives. By the 1990's the hard drives were growing rapidly starting around 40GB (gigabytes) of total storage all the way up to today's 3TB (terabytes) drives.

A Brief History of External Storage Devices - From the Floppy Disk to the Hard Drive

Hard disk drives continue to shrink with the laptop models standardizing on 2 1/2" form factor. Hard drives inside an exterior enclosure, while around technically for some time, were becoming available in the consumer market in standard formats like USB (Universal Serial Bus), FireWire, and SATA (Serial AT Attachment) though the 2000's. These new formats allowed these enclosures to be fairly portable with a standardized interface (like USB) allowing you to connect to another system painlessly. USB provides a more generic plug and play capability allowing the system to identify the drive as soon as you connect it. There are some enclosures on the market that can hold multiple drives and even offer RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) capabilities. RAID provides the ability to either mirror your data from one hard drive to another or stretch (stripe) the data across the drives you have. What this provides is a failsafe in case you loose a hard disk drive due to failure the computer will not notice any difference in accessing your data as the other hard drives take over.

Although disk drives remained standardized by form factor (full height or half height) the floppy drive diversified into a full field of products including today's USB drives. In late 1980 there came a new format called CD (compact disk) which offered data stored onto a plastic disc with reflective backing. These CD drives were 5 1/4" form factor and fit easily into existing expansion bays in the PC. CDs began storing 680MB of data holding around 74 minutes of music and have topped out at 700MB of data. CDs became the standard format for removable storage and are still widely used today. In the early 1990's Iomega came to market with the Iomega Zip drive. This external storage device started at 100MB and grew to 750MB densities. It was cartridge based continuing the 3 1/2" floppy innovation. This new type of storage had different connections to the PC.

In the beginning the connection was SCSI (small computer system interface) but later on it developed into a USB (universal serial bus) connection. By 1995 SmartMedia had arrived on the scene from Toshiba Corporation. SmartMedia was a small (45mm) plastic card with a flash memory module inside allowing 2MB of direct storage but this quickly grew to the 64MB/128MB. These cards were used in digital cameras and other devices allowing the ability to remove the storage and read it on your PC. Today you can find various sizes up to 32GB on a single card. By contrast to older technologies these new devices were far more rugged than the floppy drive and much more portable. During this same timeframe the DVD (digital video disk) arrived to the market to replace the CD. This format provided 4.7GB (8.5G double layered) of storage space on the same optical disc format that the CDs were based on. As density increased Blu-Ray DVDs arrived to provide 50GB of storage space with dual layer discs being the most common. Blu-Ray provides the best high density video format available today commercially with 100GB of data being the standard.

Flash forward to today as the hard drives and portable external storage have progressed to SSD (Solid State Disk) technology. This transformed portable storage allowing for those ubiquitous USB flash drives people carry around with them. Internal hard drives based on SSD technology allow you to use SATA to connect the drive internally to your PC or laptop. SATA is the common standard for connecting hard drives. These drives are more durable and have a lower access time. As new emerging technologies arrive like cloud computing there will be less demand for portable storage and hard drives. Cloud computing allows you to run your application on the web while your data resides elsewhere (the cloud). Make no mistake your data is being stored, just not on your hard drive or floppy.

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A Quick History Of The Floppy Disk

Even though there is a lot to be said about floppy drives, these forms of data storage are mostly mentioned in a historical capacity. While you can do a data backup to a floppy disk (assuming your computer even has a floppy drive) it is definitely not recommended. There are many other methods of backing up your information that are far more reliable and offer far higher capacities.

The floppy disk was the first truly portable form of information storage for computers. Sure, you could move tape drives around at risk of severely damaging the tape, and you could move punch cards from computer to computer, but both of these storage options were unwieldy. When they were invented, floppy disks could store up to 1.44MB of data.

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As you can probably tell already, 1.44MB of storage space is nothing in the world of today where most of the files you will be saving are several or even several hundred megabytes in size.

A Quick History Of The Floppy Disk

The floppy disk was invented by Dr. Nakamats, who apparently did most of his thinking at the bottom of his swimming pool. The floppy disk drive was just one of the many things that he invented while sitting on the bottom of his pool. Almost as soon as it was invented, the floppy disk made punch cards obsolete - they were just so portable, reliable, and easy to use.

The first floppy disks were invented in the 1960's by IBM. The disks were 8" across and were used during the 1970's on the computers of that time. However, it was the smaller floppy disk drives that were commonly used in people's homes.

There were two sizes of these commonly used floppy disks, the 5.25" and the 3.5" floppy. If you did not have a computer during the early 1990's or 1980's, then you probably only know of the 3.5" floppy. These typically came in sizes between 720KB and 2.8 MB - though the 1.44MB floppy disk was by far the most common size.

The 5.25" floppy was the older version and was a bit floppier than the 3.5" version. These could only hold between 100KB and 1.2MB of data.

Most computers do not come with floppy disk drives anymore. The reason for this is that they are no longer in wide use, and most of the important information that was on computers that only had floppy disks for data storage has since been moved onto newer computers or storage media.

You may still need floppy disks if you need to communicate with older technology. Some lab computers at certain schools are so old that they need floppy disks to retrieve data from and store data to.

If you need a disk drive and do not already have one on your computer, you can purchase an external drive at most computer stores. Hurry, though! This type of data storage is so out of date that it is likely that these external drives will not be available for much longer. These drives can be connected to your computer through USB or alternatively with a parallel port.

Unless the computer that you are using is too old to have USB connections, you should not be using a floppy disk to bring information to and from school or work anyway. Instead, you can just use a USB flash memory drive, which is much smaller and harder to damage.

Do not try to back up your computer on floppy disks! The number of disks that you will need will quickly make this into a time consuming and expensive task!

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