Data Storage Evolution

TLC-BR Mini Paper Nr 293, originally published on August 17th 2017, in Portuguese.

Among the many memories I have of my father in our chats about technology, one of the most striking (and recurring) is related to the rapid evolution of storage media. When I was in college, I showed him a 3.5” floppy disk, and explained that he could store 1.44MB of data, the equivalent of a small book. He recalled that at the time he was in college himself, he had to get a queue to punch the cards, and then another queue to read them — and hope not to stumble between the two queues not to mess up the cards (his words!).

A few years later, I decided to update him and showed him the 700MB CD-ROM. He was amazed at the storage capacity: more than 450 floppy disks stored on 1 disk.

Whenever I see something new in this area, this memory comes to mind.

Why this memory now? Well … last March, I read an article about scientists discovering that it is possible to store data in atoms. Using an extremely small model of what we see today in hard drives, scientists were able to store 1 bit in a particle Holmium (Chemical Element with the Symbol Ho, atomic number 67, solid, relatively soft and malleable, found in monazite and gadolinite, discovered in 1878).

To get an idea of ​​how much is 1 bit stored in 1 atom, a hard disk currently needs 100,000 atoms to make the same recording.

Holmium is not found in nature as a free element, but occurs in combination with other elements. Assuming a piece of 100g pure Holmium, its storage capacity would be 45.5 x 1021 Bytes (same as 45.5 Zettabytes or 48,855,252,992 Terabytes)

However, this form of storage is still only theoretical in the laboratory, considering that the conditions needed for this storage require an extremely controlled environment, including vacuum and the use of liquid helium for temperature control.

Shortly before that, researchers from a Paulista University in Brasil were able to develop a glassy material that could receive 3-dimensional recordings, with a theoretical storage limit of 1.6TB per cubic centimeter.

About 60 years ago, the world knew about the first hard drive, RAMAC, with a capacity of 5MB (dimensions: 152.4cm length / 172.72cm width / 73.66cm height). Since then, the discoveries and evolution of data storage have not stopped… cassette (1972), floppy disks (8 ”- 1971, 5 ¼“ — 1976 and 3 ½ ”- 1984), CD-R (1990), ZIP Drive (1994), the now known “Pen Drive” and SD Cards (2000), to name a few. Given the latest discoveries of data storage in glass, and the latest in atoms, the possibilities for the future are numerous.

And, it could not be different, because each day, the market demands for data storage grow. Internet of Things, Social Networking, Big Data, Cognitive, everything we imagine needs to store information somewhere, and as the world doesn’t stop, neither does data growth.

Let the future come, and these new data storage formats, glass, atom, … whatever our imagination and creativity allow.

I wish my dad was still alive to see this with me — he would surely tell (again) his punch card story…

To learn more

This article was originally published on August 17th 2017, as part of IBM TLC-BR Mini Paper Series — a bi-weekly TLC-BR publishing. To subscribe to receive future editions in your email, send an email to tlcbr@br.ibm.com.

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