Removable media is portable storage not permanently connected to a computer. Tape drives were the first, followed by floppy disks, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray. USB flash drives and SD cards are popular options. Each has unique advantages and disadvantages.
Removable media is a method of storing computer data through usually magnetic or optical media as of 2011. This data is contained on portable storage devices that are not physically connected to a computer permanently, such as the hard drive installed in factory be. There are many different types of removable media, and the hardware industry that creates them is constantly evolving. Tape drives were the very first forms of removable electronic media made in the 1950s, but those commercialized formats for personal computers known as floppy disks didn’t emerge until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since 2011, many new types of storage devices have been created, each with its own unique advantages and disadvantages.
The least portable method of removable magnetic media storage first created in 1951 was the tape drive, which was often used to back up data from corporate servers and initially could only hold 224 kilobytes of data. The tape drive has continued to evolve and be used in environments where large amounts of corporate, government, or personal data need to be stored semi-permanently. As of 2011, there are tape drives capable of holding up to 5,000 gigabytes of data, or 5 terabytes, or about 22,000,000 times more data than the first tape drives could hold in 1951.
Magnetic tapes known as floppy disks emerged for basic personal computer systems in 1983 and were either 5.25 inches (13.34 centimeters) or 3.5 inches (8.89 centimeters) in size, with a maximum of about 1.2 megabytes each. These technologies and formats were superseded in 1994 by the introduction of the Zip disk, which resembled a thicker version of a 3.5-inch (8.89 cm) floppy disk and required a separate hardware drive to connect to your computer system to access the contents of the disk. The Zip disk initially could hold 100 megabytes of data, and was soon replaced by higher density models that could hold 250 megabytes and then 750 megabytes each.
Removable magnetic media became obsolete in the short term in the early 1990s as optical data storage started to become practical. In 1997, the compact disk read-only memory (CD-ROM) platform became widely available as an optical data storage method. Optical disk drives became the norm on personal computer systems, replacing older floppy disk drives and making the inconvenient and expensive peripheral of the Zip disk reader obsolete. Although CD-ROM disks held only about 700 megabytes of data, they were considered more versatile and reliable than magnetic forms of storage and could be mass-produced at a less expensive per-unit rate than Zip disks and Zip disk readers.
As of 2011, CD-ROM discs themselves have largely been replaced by digital video disc (DVD) technology, where a single DVD is capable of holding anywhere from 4.7 to 17.08 gigabytes of data. This makes the storage capacity of 1 DVD equal to at least 7 CD-ROM discs. Optical discs such as DVDs have gained market share largely because they can hold the entire contents of a video presentation such as a commercial film, whereas this was not possible with earlier forms of removable media. Blu-ray was a new format for DVD created in the year 2000 that used a more compact blue laser to write data to the disc. Invented by Sony Corporation in Japan, the Blu-ray format can be as old as 23 gigabytes to 54 gigabytes of data per disc as of 2011.
As the field of removable media has continued to advance, many types of portable magnetic storage options have become popular in the market, including Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, Secure Digital (SD) cards, and USB-connected compact external hard drives. unit. Flash drives can hold up to 16 gigabytes each as of 2011 and are very popular, as they are small thumb-sized drives for which almost all personal computers have USB ports and include software designed to easily read the contents of the unit once I’m connected. The SD card and its high-density (HDSD) versions were largely targeted at the digital camera market, although SD ports also exist on most modern personal computers, where each postage stamp-sized card holder can hold many thousands of still digital photos, as well as video, audio and other content.
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