Storage: Exponential Opportunities

Who remembers — OK, heard of 😉 — the times, when an 8” Floppy with incredible 1 MB of storage (later even 5 MB) was labeled “high-end” for a workstation?  That was about 30 years ago.  When mainframes (today called enterprise systems) were top of the line with 6 MB main memory, and, say, 300 MB of disk storage and more.  There were available as head-per-track disks and swappable disk packs mounted in dishwasher size drawers.

Disk storage was an expensive commodity back then, and data frequently got offloaded to somewhat cheaper magnetic tapes.  (With fingers crossed that that data could be retrieved OK later-on!)

About 15 years ago then as PCs (evolved from game consoles and the Commodores and Ataris connected to a TV and using compact audio cassettes as storage, then to the so-called MC or Micro-Computer with 5¼“ floppies) became more and more common, a hard disk drive with some 2 GB capacity had a price tag of $1000.

BTW, I came across an early version of a Winchester hard disk drive with incredible 80 MB capacity and 2 PC slots = 2U high!  (1U = 1¾”)

Tape cartridges (QIC or Quarter-Inch-Cartridge with 150 MB / 300 MB then 650 MB; later 4mm DAT or Digital Audio Tape cartridges with 2 GB / 4 GB capacity) for data backup, CD-ROMs (650 and 700 MB) were also a viable alternative.

Prices were falling rapidly:  Less than five years later, a 20 GB hard disk drive came down to $200.  Backup tapes had further evolved to store 20 GB/ 40 GB on a single cartridge.

One troubling trend, though, became apparent:  While tape cartridges were said to keep the data for 20 or more years (in an environment with ideal temperature and humidity, of course, and given you were using them only a very few times), that did not necessarily hold true for the actual tape cartridge drives!  I.e., if you had one or a couple of those quite expensive drives, and they became worn if not kaput, then you found it next to impossible to acquire a — now obsolete — replacement drive!  Thus, you ended up having a stock pile of backup tape cartridges with often irreplaceable data, but no means to read and extract said data!  (Unless, of course, you took care transferring your data periodically from one generation of tape cartridges to the next, every other year or so…)

1999 high-speed internet (DSL) became broadly available to the public; ISPs expanding their services, providing not only free email but also disk storage to allow publishing your pictures on the internet, and numerous web sites were offering photos (e.g., NASA) and music (e.g., House of Blues), online banking, news and research, software downloads, and what not.

(I see as the actual begin of what we now define „Cloud Computing“ when internet service providers in larger scale made data accessible over the internet — revenue model included.  And that would include the pre-DSL times,  through dial-in modems sporting speeds of 9600 / 14400 / 19200 bps, and eventually 56 kbps.)

As the hard disk drive provided more and more storage capacity for a lesser price, so increased the, well, “hunger” for more.   When I think of what I stored on my hard disk drive with the now oh so few GB back then: mainly emails, important documents, pictures, and such.  And a couple years later, hard disk drives now in ten-fold capacities allowed me to store my CD collection as readily accessible MP3 files.  More software downloads.  Scans of paper documents into digital format.  Video on demand.   Data backup and drive images to (external) disk drives.

And there is always a scaling up — not down.  Software patches are now regularly distributed that are in the hundreds of MB.  Installing Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 with a bunch of applications easily occupies 20 to 30 GB  of disk space on your hard disk drive — just the Program and Windows folders alone!  But then, who cares, when hard disk drives with 1.5 TB (or, rather 1.5 x million x million byte) are available for $105?   🙂

As storage demand for the end-user increases, so most certainly is it seen for the enterprise market.

(to be continued)

©  September 2009 Jürgen Menge, San José

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