Imagine Lady Luck smiles and you have more currency notes than can fit into your wallet. What will you do? Reject those notes just for lack of storage space or compress them to fit into your wallet? The same applies to data storage. It cannot be rejected or deleted merely due to lack of storage space.

The days are over when hard discs of 20 megabytes (MB) with some floppy discs of 1.44 MBs were enough to store data. Now in the era of gigabytes, companies have to equip themselves with the latest storage devices. New technologies have come out with a wide variety of drives under various configurations. Audio and image/video is predominant in digital design/entertainment and these storage drives are ideal to backup a huge amount of data. Mobile storage devices make large quantities of data portable.

Tape drives are being used to store data that are seldom accessed, where as CD-ROMs are used for frequent accesses (which can hold around 650 MB of data). Zip drives, Jaz drives and ORB drives are becoming user-friendly over older tape drives and magneto optical (MO) drives. They are gaining popularity because of the huge space they have to store data and the incredible speed with which this data can be accessed. Zip drives do support SCSI, IDE and Universal Serial Bus ports, but they do not come in various capacities. Optical Super Density (OSD) technology seeks to provide MO drives with higher capacity at lower cost.

Where and how can these drives be driven?

Obviously they will be driven depending on the requirements. Zip and Jaz drives being portable, offer 100 MB to 5.2 GB with good rates of data transfer. Tape drives are used as mass storage options that require space for gigabytes though they are slow in transferring the stored data.

The following matrix illustrates storage capacities of various drives:

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