Most people don’t think about their hard drive space or, physically, how big their hard drive is. Hard drives first came around in the mid 1950′s as data storage for IBM. The first hard drives were roughly the size of a small room and was able to store a whopping 4MB of data. The physical size of the hard drive shrunk as the data storage capacity grew for the next 40 years. As computers became more mainstream in the 1990′s, storage capacity doubled roughly every 2 years.

A typical hard drive consists of a platter or platters where the information is stored, read/write heads that store and access the information, and motors to drive the read/write heads. There is also removable media that is used in devices such as digital cameras, cell phones, and MP3 players. This type of drive does not use motors and platters, but instead uses electrical contacts to read and write data.

SSD or Solid-State Drives have been around since the 1970′s and is the form used in the removable cards is in digital devices. This is beneficial as they can be dropped with little to no damage done.  The contact pins are recessed so that they aren’t touched easily. Other media that has been produced is the 5 1/4” floppy disk, the 3 1/2” floppy disk which wasn’t so floppy, the CD and the DVD. These types of media were used for transportation of data in a portable version. Currently, most people use a USB flash drive or portable hard drive to store data. These are perfect, but you still want to take precautions as some data is priceless and may not be able to be easily recovered. The best option is to back up sensitive data in multiple locations.