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We had a look at saving your data and how the mediums developed through magnetic tape, floppy disks, hard drives
and on to their latest incarnations – the SSD and the latest M2 devices. For the first half of the presentation, I showed
how these devices developed and how to install the latest M2 devices onto a computer. In the second half of the
presentation. Alan put some of these devices through their Paces and showed us how each compared for speed.

Data is stored in bits which can be stored as either a 1 or 0 in value – basically on or off. Magnetic tape was the origi-
nal medium for data storage and anyone seeing old computer footage will note the magnetic spools whirring away in
some colossal housing.

In computer terms data is stored in bits and eight of these constitute a byte of storage. This is the basis of all computer
programming no matter what high level language you use at a base level it is all 1’s and 0’s. A variation of the mag-
netic tape were punch cards and paper tape and these held the data in blocks of 8 bits or a byte.

The magnetic medium however, is the basis of all storage devices simply because the data can be easily erased or writ-
ten over, whereas punched cards and tape could only be used to save data once.

A more portable type of medium was necessary as smaller business and home computers emerged in the late 1970’s
and early 1980’s and the magnetic floppy disk was developed. From here, the Compact Disk and DVD were created.
Over time as smaller devices required smaller memory storage mediums along came the compact flash cards and port-
able flash drives.