Data, Data and Storing it in The Cloud

Our ever expanding personal libraries of documents, photos, videos and music has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of data we store. In Part One, we looked at the history of computer storage. Today, more and more individuals and businesses are choosing to store this content somewhere other than their personal computer, hard drive or phone.  

Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive; the names are familiar and they essentially all do the same thing - store files remotely for you. Add in social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube for photo and video storage and you the have potential for a significant amount of your data being stored in "The Cloud" 

No, your files are not orbiting somewhere in the stratosphere, but stored on enormous facilities full of hard drives spread around the world in what is a global scale computer network connected by the internet. In essence, you files are sent along a pipe, and filed on someone else's hard drive, then backed up on other hard drives in different locations around the world. If you have an active internet connection you now have free (or very cheap) data back up solutions available to you. 

 But hang on, is my data safe if I store it in the Cloud? 

The simple answer is yes. Sort of. Everything is hackable and nothing is breach proof, however if you follow standard precautionary rules like choosing credible providers and using strong passwords you are much less likely to lose data than by using home grown methods. After all, rates of personal data back up is very low. We've all been there - laptop gets left on the bus, flash drive gets put through the wash, or phone falls down the toilet and you don't have a backed up copy of that important presentation or precious photo. Syncing your data with a cloud solution can avoid these potentially painful experiences, not to mention making your files more accessible when you are away from your computer.

The investment in storage and security by big players such as Facebook and Google in security and infrastructure is vast. As an example Google has a dozen data centres around the world, containing an estimated 900,000 servers using 260 million watts of power. Facebook's most recent facility pictured below (note the trucks for scale) is built on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, in an attempt to keep energy usage lower. Amazon is currently building a similar facility in remote Northwest China for the same reason. All those targeted advertisements on web pages and in your Facebook feed are there in part to pay for this infrastructure.

It is estimated that 2016 will be the year that a mind-blowing one Zettabyte of data will be stored online, that's enough for a 22 billion year long music playlist and remembering Moores Law this amount will only continue to rise.

So whats next? In part three we look at streaming services and productivity in the cloud and answer the question, how much data fits into the human brain.

Data, Data and Where to Store It.

Part One - The History of Data Storage.

Since the time when computers became a significant part of our lives, the need to save and move data has existed. In the first installment of this three part series, we take a look at the history of removable data storage.

Prior to the invention of the floppy disk in 1971, computer storage existed in several mediums

including punch cards, magnetic tape and even rope. The original floppy disk made it possible to move data easily from one computer to another and on release had a grand total of 80KB of memory, enough data for a ten page word processed document or approximately 1% of a modern digital photo file. Floppy disks went through various iterations in physical size and capacity over a twenty year period and maxed out at 1.44 MB of storage before newer technology superseded them.

In 1987 (Walk Like an Egyptian anyone?) Toshiba invented flash storage, a new type of technology that uses printed circuit boards rather than spinning disks to store information. It wasn’t until the turn of the century though, when personal computers began shipping with USB ports, that removable flash storage in the form of thumb drives became widely available. Although expensive in its infancy, flash storage is now cheap, reliable and has enormous capacity compared to its floppy predecessor. 

In keeping with Moores Law that suggests computing power doubles every two years, Samsung have just revealed a flash drive with 16TB of capacity, enough for over 1000 HD copies of the entire Star Wars Series (or about 16000 HD episodes of Game of Thrones if that's more your style). Most recently, with the adoption of smartphones, cameras, GPS, etc, flash storage is everywhere in the form of SD cards. While other storage mediums like CD ROM have come and gone, flash, with its tiny size, large capacity, high speeds, 10,000 write cycles and great reliability have meant we've come a long way since the humble floppy disk of 40 years ago and it would be unusual for a person to not use flash storage in some form in a typical day. As always with all technology however, even a 16TB flash drive will soon be obsolete. Tech companies Intel and Micron are working on a new type of storage called 3D XPoint that is 1000 times faster than flash and ironically shares some concepts with the 1960's rope storage technology that was used on the Apollo Space Mission.

So where to next?

In part two we examine cloud computing and why Facebook is building data storage facilities in the middle of ice fields.