Introduction Hard Drives and Storage Media

At the very moment when the first computer first processed several bytes of data, the question immediately arose: where and how to store the obtained results? How to save the results of calculations, text and graphic images, arbitrary data sets?

This question is rooted in its deep antiquity. Information was always, regardless of whether it was perceived by man or not. And the man, barely standing out from the animal world, began to actively use information for their own purposes. Moreover, he himself became a source of information for others. Even then, they knew how to receive, process, transmit, accumulate, and most importantly, store it.

At first, for storing and accumulating information, a person used his memory - he simply memorized the received information and remembered it for some time. The information flows of that time cannot be compared with the current ones, so there is still enough human memory. The case was limited to the names of fellow tribesmen, two spells of evil spirits, and a dozen myths and legends.

Gradually, people came to the conclusion that this method of storing information has several disadvantages:

- a person could confuse various data;

- misunderstand another person;

- elementary to forget something important;

- in the end, he could just kill on the hunt.

Understanding all the unreliability of this method of storing and accumulating information, a person came up with the idea of ​​recording information in the form of drawings on the walls of caves in which he lived. It was a huge step forward in the way of storing information: a man compared the facts and events of real life with schematic drawings and icons on the wall of a cave - he encoded information. In this form, the information was much easier to store and accumulate, the caves were then large and there were many places on the wall.

Things were even more fun with the invention of writing: people began to write the received information on tablets, tablets, papyrus, and later in the books that they had invented by that time. The flow of information has increased dramatically, in addition, people discovered a lot of ways to get or get information, and got it in full.

Very soon a huge amount of information accumulated - hundreds of years of human thought achievement were carefully recorded, documented and stored in uncountable archives and repositories.

By the middle of the 20th century, the flow of information reached enormous proportions and continued to grow rapidly in a geometric progression. Humanity has begun to sink in the ocean of all kinds of information that is overwhelming it. At this critical moment, the computer was invented - a device for receiving, storing, storing, processing, transmitting and distributing information.

And as soon as it was invented, the question immediately asked was how the computer would store this information. Obviously, none of the above methods were suitable. I had to invent something new.

First of all, there should be a device with the help of which the computer will memorize information, then a storage medium is required on which it can be transferred from place to place, and the other computer should also easily read this information. Consider some of these devices:

1. Punch card reader : designed for storing programs and data sets with punch cards - cardboard cards with holes punched in a certain sequence. Punch cards were invented long before the advent of the computer, with their help they obtained very complex and beautiful fabrics on weaving looms, because they controlled the work of the mechanism. If you change the punched card set and the fabric pattern is completely different, it depends on the location of the holes on the card. With respect to computers, the same principle was used, only instead of the fabric of the hole pattern, computer commands or data sets were set. This method of storing information is not without flaws: - very low speed of access to information;

- A large amount of punched cards for storing a small amount of information;

- low reliability of information storage;

- besides, small circles of cardboard constantly flew from the perforator, which fell on my hands, in my pockets, stuck in my hair, and the cleaners were terribly unhappy.

People were forced to use punch cards not because they liked this way, or he had some indisputable advantages, he didn’t have any advantages at all, just at that time there was nothing else, there was nothing to choose from. , had to get out.

2. Tape drive (tape drive) : based on the use of tape-type devices, and cassettes with magnetic tape. This method of accumulating information has been known for a long time and is successfully used today. This is explained by the fact that quite a large amount of information is placed on a small cassette, information can be stored for a long time and the access speed is much higher than that of a punch card reader.

On the other hand, a streamer is only suitable for accumulating, storing large amounts of information, backing up data. It is almost impossible to process information using a streamer — a sequencer data access device is a streamer: to get the 5th file, we must squander four. And if you need 7529 minutes?

3. Floppy Disk Drive (Floppy Disk Drive): A Comparative New Storage Device. This device uses floppy disks as floppy disks, which can be 5 or 3 inches. A diskette is a magnetic disk, like a plate, placed in a cardboard envelope. Depending on the size of a floppy disk, its capacity in bytes changes. If a standard 5'25-inch diskette fits up to 720 Kbytes of information, then a 3.'4-inch diskette is 1.44 MB. Floppy disks are universal, suitable for any computer of the same class equipped with a disk drive, can be used to store, accumulate, distribute and process information. The drive is a parallel access device, so all files are equally accessible. Now floppy disks are used mainly for backing up small amounts of data and for disseminating information. Diskettes measuring 5'25 inches are obsolete and rarely used.

The disadvantages include a small capacity, which makes it almost impossible to store large amounts of information in the long term, and not very high reliability of the diskettes themselves.

4. Hard disk drive (HDD - HDD): it is a logical continuation of the development of magnetic information storage technology. Appeared several years ago and have already gained immense popularity due to its numerous merits:

- extremely large capacity;

- simplicity and reliability of use;

- the ability to access thousands of files simultaneously;

- High speed data access.

Among the shortcomings, we can single out only the absence of removable media, all data is recorded inside the hard drive on hard magnetic disks. (Currently used external hard drives and backup systems with disks like floppy disks). The capacity of modern hard drives is truly intimidating: five years ago, a 100 MB hard drive seemed an unattainable ideal, the limit of cherished dreams - it seemed that half of its space would be enough for many years of work. But five years have passed, and such hard drives are no longer even released as obsolete. They were replaced by new, faster, more spacious devices. Winchesters with a capacity of 850 MB, 1.6, 2.1, 3.5, 4.3 GB for a long time no one is surprised. But there are hard drives 1000 times more capacious - we are talking about terabytes of information. One such hard drive would be enough to record the entire history of the Ancient World.

So far they are used only in very reputable organizations, but let's wait about five years ...

5. The device of reading compact discs ( CD-ROM ): appeared several years ago and already widely spread. These devices use the principle of reading by a focused laser beam of grooves on the metallized carrier layer of a compact disc. This principle makes it possible to achieve a high density of recording information, and therefore a large capacity with minimal dimensions. A compact disk is an ideal means of storing information - cheaply ridiculous, practically unaffected by any environmental influences, the information recorded on it will not be distorted and erased until the disk is physically destroyed, has a capacity of 650 MB, comparable to a good hard drive. its production is incomparably cheaper and simpler, with the size of a 5-inch diskette it holds 900 times more information than a diskette.

It has only one drawback - information cannot be recorded on a CD. Data is written to it either during production, or later, by a user (CD-R device), but only once.

6. Other devices for storing and storing information: in addition to the above-mentioned main devices for storing and storing information, there are some others that are less popular for various reasons. These devices include:

- magneto-optical disks;

- Bernoulli wheels;

- data backup devices;

- some other devices.

All these devices have different capacities, speeds of access to information, their disadvantages and advantages, as well as different prices. They have their limitations, but there are undoubted advantages. One thing they all have in common - these devices were created to store, accumulate and back up data.

And finally, the forecast – announcement: very soon a novelty will appear on the information storage devices market - it will be a device for accumulating information on special disks like a CD. They will support the standard DVD and have a capacity of 4.72 Gigabytes, and it will be possible to record information on them and it is natural to read them more than once. This development will make a revolution in the theory of storage and accumulation of information. This time is very close.