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The technology of portable data storage devices has advanced significantly over the past 50 years in a way that is unquantifiable for almost any other technology advance in the same time period. For instance, when hard disk drives were introduced in 1956, they were the size of a double refrigerator and could only hold about 2 megabytes worth of data. Nowadays, you would be hard pressed to find any device that had just 2 mb worth of data – the smallest commercially available flash drive in the world (smaller than the size of a quarter) holds at least 2 gigabytes – that’s more than two thousand times the amount of data that the double sized refrigerator held just 50 years ago.
Size isn’t the only thing that has changed when it comes to being able to take our data anywhere we go. The market for novelty storage devices continue to grow every year and are marketed to a wide range of subcultures, showing that the need for portable data storage is near universal. Pens, bracelet, cars and other toys can all masquerade as portable flash drives.
Finally, the future of portable data is closer than you think. Some technology insiders are predicting that the next big breakthrough in portable technology will be the touch-screen hard disk drive. The touch HDD would act as a regular portable data drive in its ability to connect to your computer either through wireless signal or being plugged in, but it would also have a touch screen that would allow it to scroll through pictures and play both movies and music without a separate computer screen.
