The growth of the hard drives.

Computer hard disk drives can be compared to storage containers in our daily lives. Unlike a cabinet used to store paper records and files, Wikipedia defines a hard disk drive as a non – volatile random access device used to store changing digital data. In other words the hard disk gives a computer the ability to recall things when there is no power.

International Business Machines (IBM) introduced them in 1956 and over the years they have evolved in terms of their storage capacity, their speed to read and write data and they have been less vulnerable.

Hard disk drives are the physical storage areas for secondary data that is to be processed by a computer system via a volatile temporary memory (RAM) to the processor (CPU).

Enough of what it is and what a hard drive does, this storage device has over the years evolved since the 1960s. Punch cards were the core storage devices in the 20^th Century; they were fed into IBM 350, which was a commercial computer system. From 1979 to today: Six hard drives have reduced in size from 8-in. (inch) model, followed by 5.25-in., 3.5-in., 2.5-in., 1.8-in. (used by Apple IPod first in 2001) to 1-in.

Today, isoSafe have introduced an indestructible portable hard drive, not even a short gun could damage it. This was show cased in the ongoing International Consumer Electronic Show http://www.cesweb.org/default.asp, which is the world largest technology show.

The show, dubbed CES 2011 has been an ongoing event, takes place in the begging of each year in Las Vegas, kicked off on the 6^th of 2011 ends 9^th.  The hard drive is build not only to with stand physical impact but also with a HydroSafe water barrier technology that prevents damage to the data due to water leaks up to 72 hours in water.

The hard disk has not only developed in terms of physical strength, size and sleekness but also its capacity. isoSafe hard drive is 2 Terabyte huge, if I can compare this storage to a normal 8 GB flash drive, it means this hard drive can hold data of 250, 8 GB flash drives. In other words, 2 Terabytes can hold approximately1333 high definition (HD) movies.

This is a breakdown of computer storage capacities.

· 1 Bit = Binary Digit (A Bit is the smallest unit of data that a computer uses. It can be used to represent two states of information, such as Yes or No.)
·  8 Bits = 1 Byte
· 1000 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte 
· 1000 Kilobytes = 1 Megabyte 
· 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte

· 1000 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte (a Terabyte could hold about 3.6 million 300 Kilobyte images or maybe about 300 hours of good quality video.)

· 1000 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte

There is nothing constant as change; everything is evolving to the betterment of life. Since we are on hard drives as storage device, let’s watch the future and see what technologies like the “cloud computing” have for us in terms of data storage & what happens to the physical hard drives that exist.