How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years 100
Lucas123 writes "Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs. As much data as the digital age creates (2.16 Zettabytes and growing), data storage technology has always found a way to keep up. It is the fastest growing semiconductor technology there is. Consider a microSD card that in 2005 could store 128MB of capacity. Last month, SanDisk launched a 128GB microSD card — 1,000 times the storage in under a decade. While planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, technology such as 3D NAND and Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) hold the promise of quadrupling of solid state capacity. Here are some photos of what was and what is in data storage."
Re:Using 'songs' as units of measurement? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, it wasn't a terrible unit of measure early on, especially with things like mp3 players, cameras, and SD cards.
Yes, an mp3 can vary in size dramatically, but there is a fairly consistent average. Most mp3's are going to be somewhere between 3 and 10 MB. That's close enough to give a rough estimate of how many "songs" you can fit on your mp3 player.
It was a reasonable measure for a non-technical person because it was a capability they were actually concerned with. These days it's silly though, because the number of songs you can fit on even the cheapest walmart mp3 player is in the "probably more songs than you will listen to in your lifetime" kinda range. It's turned into a big cool sounding number rather than a useful piece of information.
Re:Just in the last 16 years... (Score:4, Insightful)