data storage

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everyone's got electronic files that they want to keep. whether it's photographs or drawings, recordings or music, writings or scanned papers, it all has got to be stored somewhere. unfortunately, however crucial and/or wanted these documents may be, the grim reality for most people is this:

most people do not have a long-term data storage plan.

so how did we get here? and what can we do? i'm going to try my best to explain each storage device, type, when you should use them, cost estimates, and good storage practices.

pre-electronic >> before the advent of electronic data storage, without diving into too much detail, there was a type of physical data storage that had been developed at several independent times that you've likely heard of: hole-punching. as far back as 1725, basile bouchon created a system in which holes punched into paper tape partially controlled and automated a loom. then over a century later in 1881, jules carpentier created a system for a harmonium which would record the played keys via punching holes into series of cards, which could then also be played back. then not even a decade later in 1890, herman hollerith created the tabulating machine, essentially the first punch-card computer, which would set forth the events leading up to the data processing capabilites which we have today.

magical magnets >> nearly all electronic storage mediums rely on magnetism, and specifically exploit a key property of some metals: hysteresis, or the tendency for ferromagnets to align with an external magnetic field, and then remain aligned even when the external magnetic field has been removed -- this is to become magnetized!

drum >> the first type of electronic data storage was drum memory, brought about in 1932. it was essentially a cylinder with ferromagnetic recording material on its surface, and in rows leading from top to bottom were series of heads. these heads could either detect or change the magnetic polarity, granting it the abliity to read and write data as desired. drums had as many tracks as they had heads, which wasn't a lot.

core >> core memory was up in 1951. it used metals with the same ferromagnetic properties, but formed into toroids -- hollow rings -- and these were called cores, capable of storing one bit. wires, fitted into an XY grid, were called drive lines, and ran through each core, effectively acting as an address. two other wires for sensing and inducting -- which would later be combined into one -- were used to detect and change the core's magnetic polarity, granting core memory the ability to read/write. this effectively acted as a type of magnetic storage that had no moving parts.

hard disk >> hard disk drives began their use in 1957, with very much the same basic principle of drum memory; the cylinder became a flat disk -- called a platter -- with its surface still coated in a ferromagnetic recording material, and the multiple heads became a singular head which was granted the ability of moving side-to-side across the top of the platter. this increased read/write speeds and storage capacity, especially as multiple platters could be stacked within the same hard drive to vastly increase its storage capacity. hard disk platters today are primarily made of either solid metal, or glass, which are coated with the ferromagnetic material.

optical disc >> optical discs, in contrast to the other storage devices here, do not use magnetic material to store data. instead, the disc relies upon photons which get reflected off of the disc. the disc's surface -- called land -- has grooves physically written into it -- called pits. these pits among the disc's land are both written and read by a sensor which determines the reflected photons, and the reflected photons are translated into actual data. the optical disc and the punch-card are among the oldest types of data storage, with the first optical disc being invented in 1884, with its material being glass. modern high-capacity optical discs use durable, inorganic recording materials.

flash and solid state >> flash storage launched in 1987, and it works in a similar method of core memory. memory cells made from floating-gate transistors are arranged into an array, and these cells are capable of storing 1 bit. each cell has two terminals -- referred to as sources and drains -- which can be used to read or change a cell's stored charge using a series of voltage threshold detections through gates -- referred to as floating gates and control gates. cells can also be layered in order to increase a flash memory device's storage capacity.

audio format coincidence >> oddly enough, the physical aspect of computer data storage seems to have gone down the same route as audio storage over half a century prior. these audio recordings went from being in a cylindrical format to a disc format, much in the same way that the drum storage's cylinder became the flat hard disk platter.

la harde drive

la harde drive

tape -- or in this case, specifically referring to lto tape -- is a medium that was built specifically with long-term storage in mind. the lastest tape cartridges can hold up to 18 tb uncompressed, and up to 45 tb compressed. however, it has two extremely steep drawbacks: absymal seek-time, as the tape must be spooled back-and-forth for seeking, and an enormous upfront cost for both the cartridges and drive.

optical discs are arguably the best solution for long-term storage, as once they are written, the data is permanent. modern optical discs have mostly fixed the issue of days far gone, with discs bending back to their original form and being surprisingly scratch-resistant. however, one must make sure that the discs they are using are of inorganic material to prevent against bit rot. their downsides are that the maximum capacity an optical disc so far is a measly 128gb, and they aren't that fast, topping out at around 20 mb/s writing.

remember that the point of data storage is to keep your information safe, and not to take chances. use multiple devices instead of just one.