Storing content through the decades
The global transformation from analog to digital devices capable of storing data or audiovisual content has not exactly been a brief process. However, the means of digital storage are changing fast.
Robust recording
Remember the good old video cassette recorders? Well, they're still around, with Japan's Funai shipping as many as 750,000 units last year. But now the only remaining maker of VHS/VCR recorders has said it's stopping production, thus ending an era lasting four decades.
Pump up the volume
Also on their way out are cassette tape recorders and decks. For decades, they used to be a backbone technology of the electronic age for permanently storing sound. Magnetic recording held the promise of storing your stuff safely for up to 20 years, but it hardly ever lived up to expectations.
Tiny capacity
In the realm of personal computers, floppy drives - and the disks they held - became all the rage in digital storage years after Alan Shugart invented them in 1967. People who operated Windows 3.1 will remember the 1.2 MB capacity format that IBM developed in 1977.
Durable and low-cost
While floppy disks are of absolutely no use any more because of their small capacity and the huge data volumes we're confronted with today, DVD drives and recorders involving optical disc technology seem hard to oust from households, be it as standalone devices or integral parts of PCs and laptops.
SSDs vs HDDs
The most common way of storing data digitally is of course the use of hard disk drives in computers, with their capacity now reaching over 15 TB (Samsung's PM1633a). But when speed is of the essence, the fairly new solid-state drives (SSDs) are far superior.
Everyone on cloud nine?
But the most modern way of keeping your data is using a cloud storage service provider. Sending your data to the cloud frees you of having to worry about storage capacity, and you don't have to own software anymore either. But whether you feel alright storing your sensitive data outside your home is altogether a different matter.