Digital Storage Devices

An obvious advantage that the digital camera has over the old kind is how easy storing images has become with the technology it uses. Think about it: after finishing a roll of film and having it developed, can you honestly say that you like all of the pictures that you took? The answer to this question is most likely no. For sure, you have pictures that are left inside albums that are hidden from plain view.

But with the technology of digital storage devices, this problem no longer exists. You see, digital cameras are equipped with digital storage devices. Saving pictures onto digital storage devices can make viewing them more convenient.

There are a number of digital photo storage devices that you can use today. In digital cameras, for instance, the digital photo storage device would be the memory card or the memory stick. The camera would have a digital storage device of its own. However, the memory card or the memory stick would serve as supplemental memory for the user to store more pictures.

But before we move on to the current digital storage devices, let us first tackle the technology of the hard disk and the zip drive. These are actually the forerunners of the concept of developing a portable digital storage device. The hard disk is actually a digital storage device that has a fixed location, and this is inside your personal computer. This is not like any of the digital storage devices that are portable. When buying a personal computer, you would want to know the memory capacity of your hard drive. It was just a few years back, more or less a decade ago, when the memory of the hard drive was just at 2 GB. That was the largest memory available in hard disks. Today, there are many hard drives being sold in the market that have a memory of 1 TB or Tetra Byte. This is actually equivalent to 1,024 GB! Imagine the data you can store in your hard drive! All those media files documents? Surely you won’t be having any worries concerning storage anymore. But then, the catch here is pretty obvious: you cannot carry your hard disk with you. It remains stored inside your personal computer.

The zip drive is also one of the more portable digital storage devices available right now. The only offset here is that its memory capacity is just at 600 MB, compared to the 1 TB of the hard disk. But 600 MB is still very large when it comes to memory space. Plus, there’s also the convenience of attaching this to the computer without any hassles. It all boils down to convenience for the zip drive.

And then came the CDs. When the CDR and the CDRW were released, they quickly became the preferred method for storing data. The memory capacity for these CDs is 800 MB, so that's more than your usual zip drive! Plus, reading files from the CD, or transferring files from the CD to the computer, and vice versa, has also been made easier. All you have to do is insert the CD into the CD ROM drive, and you’re good to go. And with the CDRW, you can actually reuse this over and over again. All you have to do is delete the existing files from the CD, and burn a whole new set of files onto the CD.

The latest of which right now is the USB drive or the Pen drive. The acronym USB actually stands for Universal Serial Bus. By connecting the USB to the USB port of your PC, you will then have an external drive, which is perfect for transferring and swapping files between the USB drive and the hard drives of your PC!