Once upon a time, we had something called a floppy. It was a wonderful piece of engineering: a magnetic tape placed upon a spindle that could store, by the time I became old enough to use one, 1.44MB data. But as time went by, we came to realize the floppy was fickle in nature too, a fact that turned it into a joke for "flopping again and again". I still remember vividly how I lost countless files, some of them very important, due to floppies that failed in a matter of seconds.
In 2003, I gave up using the floppy. From that year onwards, it was always a CD or DVD for me. Even when I had to port a 100KB doc files. But such is the relentless march of technology that all good things must give way to better ones and the fate of optical media is not going to be any different from that of the floppy.
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, data storage technology is on the verge of changing significantly. In the last decade, everything that has anything to do with computers has been digitized. Everything, except storage. A hard disk (HD) in computers is the slowest part and even as processors with their many cores gain more and more speed, the computing experience is being held back by storage devices. Mainstream HDs spin at a pitiful 7200 rhythms per minute (those in laptops fare even worse at 5400) and writing or reading heavy DVDs or CDs is painfully slow. The result is slow boot time, slow application launch, long load time during gaming, an occasional jerk or two as you access loads of data at the same time or multi-task heavily. And this on a fairly fast computer; just because storage technology has fallen behind other advances in the field.
Till a few years ago, HDs were considered a necessary evil. We knew there was no alternative to them. But as the technology got miniaturized in the form of cellphones and digital music players, it gave a fillip to flash memory that was until then considered a luxury befitting only the gadgets which cost an arm and leg and some more. Recently, I met Eli Harari, CEO and founder of Sandisk. Harari, who researched on flash memories extensively in the eighties before launching his company, is obviously a man who knows his flash inside out. A decade earlier, when most people were still caught up in magnetic tapes, he envisaged a future for non-volatile storage devices using flash.
It took some time but that foresight is sure coming true. Harari says that flash is "already powering the mobile computing at the moment and in the future will be commonplace in mainstream devices like notebooks and computers." Flash, he says, is in almost all mobile devices. It appeared in iPod long ago and subsequently powered the digital music player revolution. It is enabling more powerful and useful cellphones. From Apple’s iPhone to Google’s Nexus One, all smart phones use flash memory because it is significantly smaller, faster and power-efficient. Similarly, devices like iPad or ebook readers use flash and so do millions of people worldwide who use pendrives to move data from one place to another.
Thanks!
For More Details Animated marketing videos
