Magnetic Storage Essay

848 Words2 Pages

History and Development
The primary computer storage medium, before the introduction of magnetic storage, was punch cards. These were paper cards on which holes were punched to indicate binary data invented by Herman Hollerith in the late nineteenth century. In June 1949, a group of scientists and engineers in IBM began working on creating a new storage device that would soon revolutionize the industry. May 21, 1952 marked the transition from punched-card calculators to electronic computers as IBM introduced the IBM 726 Tape Unit [1]. It was used to store data in IBM’s first commercial scientific computer intended to help the US military to design aircrafts [2]. Four years later, IBM made the first computer disk storage system: the 305 RAMAC drive. Although this drive could only store 5MB of data, information could be stored directly to any location on the disk surface without having to read all the information in between which was the case in magnetic tapes. This ability to access random locations had a very important effect on computer performance and enabled data to be stored and retrieved much faster than tapes. The next 60 years saw a huge progress in the magnetic storage industry from a variety of hard disks to portable memory such as cassette tapes, floppy disks and zip drives. Today, one can store even 3TB data on tiny 3.5 inch drives. This was all possible due to electromagnetism and the magnetic properties of ferromagnetic materials such as the oxides of iron[ add the magnetism part]

In 1819, a Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted was setting up his materials for an experiment when he made a brilliant observation. He noticed that when a compass needle was brought close to a wire conducting an electric current, the n...

... middle of paper ...

...f the head. As a result, the magnetic field due to the head polarizes the magnetic particles that it passes directly through the medium and aligns them to its field. Based on the flow of electric current through the coils, the polarity of the head’s field and the field induced in the magnetic medium changes its polarity.
Consequently, as the magnetic field passes through the medium, the particles that are right below the head gap tend to align in the same direction as this field. Once the individual magnetic dipoles of the particles are aligned, they no longer cancel out and a net magnetic field is observed in that region. Many magnetic particles are now operating together to produce a cumulative field with the same direction. Due to the hysteresis properties of ferromagnetic materials, the individual particles retain their magnetic dipoles as well as the net field.

More about Magnetic Storage Essay

Open Document