This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 2, 2021 - August 8, 2021

While spring cleaning in preparation for the Enhanced Movement Control Order (EMCO), I came across a box of my old belongings. Inside was an SD card holder with two 16GB cards.

When I bought them in 2016, high-speed cards for filmmaking were expensive. The 16GB variants were affordable and enough for half a day’s worth of video production. Now, they can barely hold photos from the latest cameras with their millions of megapixels.

Finding these gems is like unearthing an ancient relic, even though the photos in them date back to only 2018. It is a stark reminder of the rapidly evolving data storage landscape we have gone through in such a short period of time. Because, beyond these two SD cards, I no longer own any portable data storage device, thanks to the advent of cloud storage.

Millennials are fortunate enough to have lived through the pre-internet age. Back when internet speeds were measured in kilobytes, we had drawers stacked to the brim with CDs and DVDs. We could hardly tell the difference between these two, except for stickers promoting photo storage in the thousands and, the other, tens of thousands.

The CD era could even be described as “funky”. We have had them glued to the back of textbooks, magazines and even cereal boxes. Installing high-end video games took eons, requiring both disc A and disc B. Games that required three discs to install were known to be of a higher calibre. 

There were also mini-CDs and pocket discs that take up only half the size of normal CDs, usually bundled with new device purchases. On rare occasions, you might stumble upon the fabled deep purple or fully black disc. Although it is impressive at first sight, you soon realise that it functions almost exactly like a regular disc. Yet, it holds a treasured spot in your drawer disc collection purely because of how it looks.

Although discs may feel old and outdated, they were revolutionary for their time, being the gold standard of data storage. By nature of being digital, they could store all kinds of media, such as games, videos, music and documents.

Before CDs, music was stored in magnetic strips and cars were outfitted with cassette players. Video game consoles used to accept only cartridges of specific formats. Digital documents and software were accessed via floppy discs.

This changed in the 2000s when all of them were replaced by optical disc drives, standardising most data storage formats. The “save” icon is portrayed as a floppy disk, because its association with documents is well understood. Replace the icon with CDs, and it could mean a whole array of other things.

Following disc technology comes the evolution of flash drives, manifesting itself in the form of thumb drives, SD cards and solid-state drives (SSDs). Flash drives reigned supreme when it came to transfer speeds, but suffered in terms of storage sizes. Thus, they were used primarily in portable devices and intended for data storage.

But there is still room to go against the norm. Just a few years back, most laptops were outfitted with SD card readers. In my college years, SD cards served a multitude of purposes beyond just media recording and transfers. They even held word documents, music files and assignment PDFs. However, many laptop devices soon ditched the built-in SD card readers altogether — rendering this use case unfeasible.

Although efficiency has improved drastically in a few short years, data storage options for PCs seem to have got more boring with each passing generation. 

Fifteen years ago, a 512MB thumb drive could easily cost RM200. Today, we can have 500 times the storage size at half the price, with faster transfer speeds in a smaller form factor. However, they still function and act in the same way from the lens of the end-consumer. 

Although drives today come in sleek modern designs and vibrant colours, gone are the quirky aspects of data storage options that made them unique and fun to work with. 

Current options comprise mainly SSDs and cloud storage. Even hard disk drives (HDDs) are now being driven to obscurity, with demand shifting away from direct consumers to enterprises and data centres.

Will data storage ever be interesting again? Let us look at current research being done within the space.

The helium drive seems to be the most commercially feasible, but is the least revolutionary of the bunch. It functions similar to a typical HDD, but is filled with helium instead of air. Because helium is less dense, the disk encounters less air resistance and requires less power to spin. It is also cooler, can be manufactured in a much denser form and has greater longevity.

There is also talk of holographic storage, where data is stored in three-dimensional space. The technology involves photosensitive optical material, and different information being retrieved by shining light through separate sources. 

The most exciting research revolves around DNA storage. Researchers are now increasingly able to read and synthesise DNA, where digital 1s and 0s are converted into DNA bases A, G, T and Cs. Although slow and expensive, it beats current data storage options in terms of longevity, and is said to be able to perform error-free retrievals for up to a million years.

Perhaps one day I will be able to inject family photos into my body with a syringe and retrieve them via a thumbprint scanner or mouth swab. If I choose to have children, my memories could be passed down from generation to generation. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Such technologies are decades beyond our reach, but at least they would be an interesting way to store data. At worst, the data would be mine and mine alone, unlike the data stored in the cloud, which is kept alongside the data of millions of faceless strangers. 

And if my data were to be leaked out to the dark web, maybe shooting myself up with artificial DNA memories would not be a bad idea after all.

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