But more progress is needed to sustain it
announced the first commercial computer to use a magnetic hard disk for storage. Weighing in at about 1,000 kilograms, the 305 was the world’s most expensive jukebox. It stored 4.4 megabytes on 50 double-sided disks, each one measuring two feet in diameter and spinning 1,200 times a minute. Two access arms located and retrieved information in an average time of six-tenths of a second.
But to cloud providers the cloud is profoundly physical. They must build and maintain the physical components of the cloud and the illusion that goes with it, keeping up as the world produces more data that needs storing, sorting and crunching. The quantities of data being created are ever growing too. In 2023 the world generated around 123 zettabytes of data, according to International Data Corporation, a market-research firm.
But if you are not a scientist at Didcot—or if you are, but you are taking a break to scroll your recent group chats and Instagram posts on your phone—you will want your data from the cloud much more quickly than you can get it from tape. Flash memory, in common use on laptops and phones, is best for when data needs to be frequently looked up or modified, like recent photos. Solid-state drives save data by trapping or releasing electrons in a grid of flash-memory cells.
The cloud is also redundant in another way. Each piece of data will be stored in at least three separate locations. This means that were a hurricane or tornado or wildfire to destroy one of the data centres that had a copy of your photo, it would have two copies left to fall back on. This redundancy helps make cloud storage reliable. It also means that most of the time, millions of hard-disk drives are spinning on standby, just in case.
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