A data storage device is a device for recording information. The first data storage device is floppy disk and it was released by IBM. It was popular from 1970 to the late 1990 but floppy disk has less capacity. Later, there were many data storage device with increased capacity such as CD-R, Flash drive and Hard disk drive. Now, you can store your file easier and you can choose the device that is appropriate for your file to store. So it is very convenient to store files and they are not too expensive to buy. The data storage device can be classified into CD-R, Flash drive and Hard disk drive by capacity.
The first category is CD-R. It stands for Compact Disc-Recordable but the first name is CD Write-Once. It was released by Sony and Phillip in 1988. CD-R has a storage capacity of 700 MB and it can write only one time. So, it is usually used to store files that do not have to be updated such as images, music or videos. In the present, CD-R is not popular for storing files because it has less capacity, for example, movie has at least size of 1 GB so it can not write in CD-R and another example is if you want to write music you can write a few music, per CD-R.
The second category is Flash drive. It is integrated with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface and it is typically removable. The first USB flash drive was released by Trek Technology and IBM in 2000 and had a storage capacity of 8 MB. Nowadays, it has a storage capacity typically ranges from 512MB to 16 GB. Flash drive is suitable for transporting data from place to place and keeping it readily at hand because it implements the USB mass storage device class so that most operating systems can read and write to them without installing device drivers. It is very popular because of the medium capacity and it can rewrite data so you can store files without worry to edit your files but the weak point is the flash drive has many viruses because it does not include a write-protect mechanism. Write-protection makes a device suitable for repairing virus-contaminated host computers without risk of infecting the flash drive itself.
The third category is Hard disk drive. Hard disk drive was introduced in 1953 as data storage for an IBM accounting computer. It was originally developed for use with general purpose computers. Hard disk drive is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Hard disk drive has high capacity storage between 120GB and 1 TB and also Hard disk drive can rewrite data. Hard disk drive is usually used to store a large amount of music or movies but it is too expensive so it is not as popular as its capacity.
In my opinion, I decided to buy Flash drive because it is not too big to carry and I do not have enough money to buy the hard disk drive. If I have enough money I will buy Hard disk drive because it has high capacity and it is suitable to transport files to every computer that I use.
