In the world of computers and in our increasingly digitized century, there is valuable information that everyone should know. And is that the units of measurement for storing data are one of the things that must be made clear so that at the time of acquiring any technological resource, whether computer or cell phone, we do not receive an unpleasant surprise when we want to store.
However, data storage as we know it today has a short history, as it began to develop in the sixties of the last century. But this has not put a limit to the data storage capabilities we have today.
The evolution of data storage
It all started with the bit as a numerical expression in binary language. A bit refers to values between 0 and 1, unlike the Byte, which comprises a larger measure, being 8 bits the number.
One thing is important to clarify at this point, and that is that both bits and bytes can be used as measures to store data, but also as speed in data transmission, being the seconds the temporal measure to measure how many bits or bytes of transmission are being obtained.
In the specific case of data storage, the first storage objects that were made available to the public were punched cards. These contained a small slot inside where the coded bits were located, their capacity was low at the time.
This card evolved into floppy disks that had an approximate capacity of 720 kilobytes (KB) and this device in turn was supplanted by the CD and in turn to DVD format, in all cases using the same strategy of a protective object with binary code information that stored information.
21st century, a new era
With the development of the Internet and new formats for reproduction and recording, the capacities and devices available for storing data increased.
Thus, kilobytes, which are equivalent to 1024 bytes, are gaining ground to store more and more data. And from the end of the 90's until 2000, the CD format was consolidated and massified, containing a standard size of 700 megabytes (MB), each MB equals a total of 1024 kilobytes.
But into the new century the USB device is also known which began to have a storage capacity expressed in Gigabyte (GB) which is equivalent to 1024 MB, storing data became more and more a simple task and functional devices in size and capacity.
Another device that was booming, was the portable hard disk, these are capable of storing large amounts of information to occupy Terabytes, each terabyte is equivalent to a total of 1024 Gigabytes, terabytes being the largest measure available so far in a physical device.
Data Storage
Well, as we already know, the development available to store data has never stopped. And the cloud is the sign of the completeness we want to reach. Breaking the capacity/physical object barriers has been one of the great achievements for data storage.
This mechanism based on the network and computing, makes there are fewer limits when it comes to storage, plus the cost is lower because of its large capacity and simple production mode.
New challenges have arisen for the cloud, such as vulnerability and security issues, but work continues to be done to ensure that data storage continues to be a daily task.
Some people think that with the evolution of devices all the previous ones have become obsolete, however, there are companies that have computer backups on USB, or hard disks as preventive measures.