Daily Bits

data storage

Where on Earth Is Your Data?

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If you’re anything like Lisbeth Salander in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, you are rather particular about how and where you store your data. Now you do not have to have her social and personality issues to justify your paranoia healthy concern about your data. In fact, it is important that even the average person take care of information that is uploaded on the Internet.

With the continuing rise of social networking and other similar activities online, information security is really something that everyone should pay attention to. You don’t have to an expert in this matter – a good dose of common sense and accurate information should be enough for everyday purposes. And if you have those two elements, you ought to be safe. You also will probably be interested in this infographic about the whereabouts of the world’s data that Mozy has come up with. ((Source)) Yes, it’s the same Mozy that offers online backup services. And no, this is not a sponsored post by them. Suffice it to say that I found myself poring over the infographic and thought that some of you might be interested in the data as well.

Here are the salient points in the infographic.

There are almost 600 Exabytes of data stored all over the world today. Exa-what? My thoughts exactly. My knowledge of math doesn’t go that far, so Wikipedia had to rescue me. Exa = 1018 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Ack. Now this really calls for something more visual. Imagine putting all that data in books. Now imagine 13 layers of books covering the entire United States. Or China. That’s how much information there is. Mind-blowing to say the least.

Hard drives contain most of the world’s data. Fifty-two percent of the world’s data is stored in hard disks. Optical storage devices come second at 28%. Not surprising at all, is it?

The rise of the data centers – 8 of the 10 biggest data centers in the world are in the United States. The other 2 are in Europe.

Where is the world's data stored

Where is the world's data stored?

As for me, I belong to the majority – hard disks FTW! And I guess being a regular Facebook et. al. user (like everyone and their mom), I have a fair amount of data in one data center or another as well.

Phantom of the Floppera: Awesome Video to Kick Off the Weekend

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Do the measurements 3.5 inches and 5 1/4 inches mean anything to you? If you are around my age, surely you will have no problems associating those figures with what used to be the standard way of storing data for portability. The good old floppy disks.

Kids of today will probably only scoff at the form and size – both physically and storage capacity – of floppy disks but it used to be that the more floppy disks you had on you, the cooler it was. Now, floppy disks don’t have much use except for decorative purposes – and only if you’re geeky enough.

Either that or you can make a video like this guy did, and post it on YouTube. For sure, you will get some attention – at least from the people who can relate to using these used to be nifty devices. I don’t know about you, but if I had the equipment and the time, I would not mind playing around like this guy did and creating my own masterpiece…err, I am sure you will agree with my use of that term after watching the video.

Now don’t tell me that didn’t make you grin – at the very least – and that the video didn’t take you down memory lane, when you might have looked like this.
young bill gates
Or like this.

Photos via Online Business Schools and Nav Tones

Liquid Crystal Technology Offers Better Storage Option

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Storage is always a problem for us, isn’t it? Remember the days when all we had were hard disks with a few megabytes of storage? The days when we marveled at the floppy discs? It is amazing how technology has evolved in the past decades, really. Now, we have hard drives that can contain up to terabytes of data. How cool is that? Even flash disks can contain gigabytes of information!

Of course, it seems that in this area, we just can’t get enough – both in quality and quantity. And, if a group of researchers in Tokyo are fully successful, we just might see another generation of storage devices.

Eureka Alert just featured the work of Hideo Takezoe and his team of researchers. Apparently, they have been working on liquid crystal technology – the same technology being currently used in televisions and computer monitors. Who would have thought that they could have made progress in using this technology for data storage?

How does it work?

The group of researchers has taken advantage of a property of liquid crystals called anchoring transition. In simple terms, this property can be used to write, erase, and rewrite data by using laser beams. The liquid crystal molecules, which are rod-like in nature, are aligned by the application of these laser beams. The result? Rewritable data storage!

Even better, the liquid crystals are bi-stable, meaning that the orientation is retained in one of two directions. The practical implication is that the storage material does not need power to retain images. Imagine the potential of this technology!