External Storage - How far we have come!

It's no surprise that as a geeky type growing up in the information technology age I've been exposed to a lot of different types of storage and external media. I've just spent the day trying to get a potentially flaky 3TB hard drive to come online in my NAS box and while it's been driving me crazy, and stretching my knowledge it has led me to think back over all storage issues I've gone through over the years. Back as a kid in the early 80's and the dawn of the personal computer the first storage media I experienced was the humble audio cassette. Our first household computer was a Sinclair ZX81 which used a standard cassette recorder to play back a binary signal from its 3.5mm earphone jack into the "data in" on the computer.

The tape drive was a staple for home computers throughout the early and mid 80's with it being the most common accessory for computers such as the Commodore Vic20, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, TRS-80 and Dragon 32 & 64. I seem to remember that at the time Radio Shack (Tandy in the UK) was doing a brisk trade in these external tape drives, in fact they may have sold more of these than their own branded PC's. The tape was so important that the Amstrad 464 computer came along and built the tape player directly into the keyboard chassis (see below).

Of course the amount of data that these early machines needed to transfer wasn't high. The ZX81 had a standard onboard memory of 1Kb, the Spectrum 48Kb, the Commodore 64... well 64Kb. But the baud rates and reliability for loading a program were horrendous (250 baud) with it taking up to 15 minutes to load a game (stop whining you Battlefield 4 players). There wasn't really any way of knowing that everything was okay all you had most of the time were coloured bars to indicate anything.

If everything went well then your program might load, otherwise you often heard the tape reaching the end of the side and the tape drive would click off. You were then left to flip the tape over and try again with different volume settings or otherwise you may have lost interest in playing at all.

I think that Commodore saw that there was a real need to bring the then very expensive 5 1/4" floppy disk drive technology into the home, and leveraging their market to the commercial space they launched the 1540 and 1541 disks in around 1982-1983. This gave home users access to 170Kb of storage for about $400 (I think it was 300 pounds in the UK). Sinclair went a different direction by launching their proprietary MicroDrive. This consisted of a sealed 15ft (5m) loop of magnetic tape which could store 85Kb of information. I actually owned one of these with my Spectrum and it allowed me the ability to load and save my own basic programs easily. However they were not widely adopted by software and games manufacturers. On the other hand my brother, who owned the Commodore 64 and 1541, found ample games available on floppy disk.

The 5.25" floppy won the battle and became the main storage medium for several years, running in parallel with the 3.5" floppy which was more versatile in size and durability. During this time I went to college and then University and lost my focus on computers. I missed most of the Commodore Amiga age (although loved the graphics) and I missed the 286 and 386 IBM compatibles. Finally I was earning enough to purchase a 486 based PC in 1993 or 1994 so I picked up a DX2-50Mhz machine which I seem to remember had both a 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drive. It also had the first hard drive I had come into contact with, which I think was 20Mb in size. These hard drives often took up at least one 5.25 bay, sometimes two and weighed a significant amount. But the technology boom race was on as we headed towards 2000, and drives capacity grew and physical sizes shrank. Every month there was a computer fair held locally and I would go and hunt for bargains. I remember picking up a 210Mb EIDE 3.5" drive at one of these events along with a new EIDE controller made by Pine (I think Pine Technologies is now XFX, the video card manufacturer). At the time you took a risk with these purchases, but they were cheaper than buying from retail stores by a large margin.

Motherboards had little or no expansion built on to them and everything was an add-in card. ISA cards like the one above provided connections for serial (mouse), parallel (printer), 40 or 80 pin hard drive and possibly CD connections, and floppy connections. Some even integrated audio. You would have to juggle the jumpers on the card along with some nice additional to the MS-DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat to get the drives to work.

At this point I was using my machine for some graphic design work and needed places to store addition files. I picked up a SyQuest 5.25 internal drive, which had a useful capacity of 22Mb storage in a rigid cartridge. It was an internal 5.25" drive which ran on a SCSI bus, and was a pain to install and get working.

But while this was a great product it was quickly overtaken by other external and removable media. Firstly people were finally starting to burn data to CD's but also an amazing product hit the streets in the form of the Iomega Zip drive. This oddly coloured (blue/purple) unit stood out from the pack in that it provided 100Mb of storage in a roughly 3.5" rigid disk. The cheapest version connected via the parallel port and had a pass through for your printer. If you were more adventurous there was also a SCSI version as well as a USB version later. An internal drive (in beige) was also available for parallel ATA (IDE/EIDE).

I have a sneaky suspicion that if I looked hard enough I might be able to find a Zip disk somewhere in the house, I remember using them as storage for design work and as our first real backup media. I think the Zip had a huge affect, but it was now getting towards the turn of the century and USB was taking off in a big way (like the tech stocks). USB 1.1 made way for 2.0 and people finally had an almost hot-swappable external media option. I personally remember being happy with Windows Millennium Edition because it cleared up a number of problems I had with USB functions, do you remember the "safely remove this drive" icon? Then the Zip drive went to 250Mb, the Iomega Jazz drive hit 1Gb and then USB drives took off. External 3.5" and later 2.5" hard drives have became the norm, with USB thumb drives being the easy mobile choice for files. Right now you can easily purchase a 4TB external 3.5" drive for under $200 and a 128GB thumb drive for under $50.

Now USB 3.0 provides 5 Gbit/s transfer speeds with 3.1 offering 10 Gbit/s which should allow you a huge pipeline to transfer data. But things are changing, finally the promise of "cloud" storage is being realized with Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and applications like Dropbox (which allow storage and syncing of files over the internet). While these options may not completely replace the ability to backup large libraries of data (such as your digitized home movies) they do allow storage for important files, spreadsheets, presentations and photos with almost universal access from PC's, tablets and mobile phones. As long as they can keep files secure this is obviously where storage trends are heading. While I couldn't find recent numbers it is probably safe to say that companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft each have at least an exabyte (over a billion gigabytes) or more of storage capacity. In comparison to our old 1.44Mb floppies that about 700,000,000,000 of them... or a stack that would reach to the moon and then back... a couple of times!.