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Data Storage Essay

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The use of the computer has had a dramatic impact on everything we as individuals and businesses do since its inception. Computers have gone from being the size of an entire room to something that can be held in your hand. They have also become a main source of storage. The need for storage has grown by leaps and bounds as more types and amounts of data are transferred and stored. Words, images, streaming video are all types of storage that are being housed on networks today. One of the earliest forms of data storage was the punch card. Punch cards were perforated paper that stored patterns that were used on cloth to make designs. They were then able to store data, but could not hold much. Their primary use was to store computer …show more content…

They no longer had to keep a paper and pencil in hand to write down the information. Businesses realized that it was more cost effective to store the data and make it accessible over a network than to keep it on paper and mail it to the other user. They also did not have to worry about misplacing that piece of paper. The only thing they had to worry about was the computer crashing, of course, back ups of the data being stored were made. Storage technology has also changed on networks. One such type of storage is direct attached storage. Direct-attached storage is a digital storage system that is directly attached to individual machines. Those machines can either be your local computer or the server. There can be more than one server and they are managed separately. Sharing of data among users requires the information to be accessed through the host. These types of storage devices are set up as a RAID, disk or tape, but are most often SCSI. There is no storage network in between. This would be considered a peer-to-peer network type system. The most common one is the hard drive attached directly to a user’s computer. Direct access technology has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. One advantage of direct access is that it is easy to deploy into a network and cost effective. It only requires one machine with a hard drive. Most generally used in

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