Earlier this week I knocked a cup of water off my desk and
onto my laptop causing my heart to skip a beat and my life to flash before my
eyes. As I looked down, I watched prized pictures, videos, documents, and
everything else that was on my computer go down the drain. Luckily enough, the
water only got onto the top of my computer and everything was fine. However, I
realized that I had to back everything up that was stored in the memory of my
computer immediately. Of course, as for all things I need, I went onto Amazon
and bought an external hard drive immediately.
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| This hard drive is similar to the one I purchased |
After the hard drive came in the mail yesterday, I hooked it
up to my computer followed the prompt, and then waited as 320.6GB of my
precious information was transferred over. The way that this process worked
through a computer science standpoint was that I cleared the memory on the
external hard drive so that it was empty. I then connected it to my computer
with a USB cable to establish a link between the two devices. The computer then
sent signals with information to the hard drive and wrote that data into the
memory on the hard drive. After the data was all copied over, I then had a full
backup of all of the information on my computer. Talk about a relief!
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| The new SanDisk 1TB microSD card |
This experience related to our class discussion on how
memory works. The hard drive is able to use extract the information from the
bytes in the computer and copy them into it’s own memory. While the original
model for this system, the Turing Machine, was based around an infinite amount
of space, the hard drive that I purchased had 1 terabyte of space. While this
seems like a lot of space, it is actually not that much when you look at recent
developments. Just a few days ago, SanDisk released a design of a 1 terabyte
memory card that alone has more storage than my entire computer. Hear that
Apple? Please adopt these 1 terabyte memory cards so we no longer have to run
out of storage on our phones! As this progress with memory storage continues,
there may be some day where we can have a near infinite amount of storage on
devices.
References:
It's crazy how much storage technology has progressed as time goes on. Back in 1966 8 bits of RAM was enough of a big deal to be on the cover of a technical magazine. We now commonly use 8 gigabytes of RAM.
ReplyDeleteI have an external hard drive myself, but I have never been able to use it completely properly. I have always wondered why it wouldn't be possible to build such a piece of technology into a laptop itself, considering hard drives aren't very large in size.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting article, although many people nowadays are switching from backing up their information to a physical external hard drive to backing up some information on the cloud. Whether or not this is more or less secure is definitely up for debate.
ReplyDelete