Floppy Drives and Media: 3.5″, 5.25″ and 8″ form factors.
Secure Digital
Nicknames
Year
Capacity
Company
SD
1999
SDSC (SD): 1 MB to 4 GB
SanDisk, Matsushita and Toshiba
Mini-SD
2006
SDHC: >2 GB to 32 GB
Micro-SD
2009
SDXC: >32 GB to 2 TB+
The Secure Digital Ultra Capacity
2018
SDUC: up to 128 TB
Paper Media
Name (Nickname)
Year
Capacity
Other Info
Punched Card
1930s to 1980s
72- 96 Bytes
Company: IBM, Remington Rand
Paper Tape
1846 – 1970
~30 KB
Barcode
1974
<100 Bytes
QR Code
1994
1.5 KB
Figure 1 US archive containing punched cards from 1959. Each box contains 2,000 punched cards!
Let’s estimate how much data there is on the punched cards in the warehouse of figure 1! Say the boxes are stacked 20 high, 50 wide and 100 long that would give 100,000 boxes contained in the warehouse! Each box has 2,000 cards so there are 200,000,000 or 200 million punched cards. If each card can contain a max of ~100 bytes then there are 20 billion bytes worth of information in this warehouse! 20,000,000,000 Bytes = 20,000,000 KB = 20,000 MB = 20 TB. That is one 20 TB hard disk can store all the information contained on the punched cards in this warehouse!
