There are three main categories of storage devices: optical, magnetic and semiconductor.
Optical
- About that time, optical devices were starting to be marketed. An optical storage device is written and read with a laser. It is strong and can handle temperature fluctuations much better than magnetic media. Because the floppy was so inexpensive at this time, it took several years before the optical drives became affordable to the general and small business consumer.
Magnetic
- Magnetic media transitions were made to larger capacity portable disks such as the ZIP drive. These started with 100 MB sizes and moved to 250 and 500 MB. Part of the trouble with the ZIP drive was the speed with which they developed - it was so fast that the manufacturer neglected to keep backward compatibility going. In other words, the drive hardware for the 250-MB ZIP wouldn't work for the 100 MB disk, and the 250 disk couldn't be used in the 100. We've moved light years beyond that to improved internally-mounted hard drives, which can hold at least a terabyte of information. Think of a terabyte as enough different music to listen to while working a full-time job for an entire year! And these same hard drives have become portable and lightweight enough to carry around with us, giving us the ability to bring software and data files everywhere we go.
Semiconductor
- A semiconductor material has an electrical conductivity value falling between that of a conductor, such as metallic copper, and an insulator, such as glass. Its resistivity falls as its temperature rises; metals behave in the opposite way.
