All Hardware Storage Technologies Diseappearing or Progressively Replaced

There are always advocates of declining technologies as it continues to be the case for tape and optical.

More precisely, here are historically all the storage devices that are declining or finally disappearing completely. And there is a lot! We end with products going well.

DISAPPEARED

Punched tapes: long ribbon of paper with holes to store data; used in 1846 to send telegrams by Alexander Bain; too slow to be continued

Punch cards: also known as Hollerith cards, first used for data processing in the 1890 US census; then, in 1928, IBM developed the 80-column card becoming the dominant standard contains 80B; completely disappeared as the capacity was much too low and users were obliged to re-insert of their cards into a mechanical external devices if they did only one mistake and then taking a long time; being replaced by other storage devices in the 1960s; last use relatively recent in micrographics – now obsolete – with aperture cards with a 35mm film image integrated for engineering drawings.

Magnetic drums: demonstrated by punched-card subsidiary of IBM in Sömmerda, Germany in 1932, by Austrian engineer Gustav Tauschek (1899-1945); IBM 305 RAMAC (1956) employed drum for memory and disk for storage; very expensive and displaced by magnetic cores for main memory in the 1950s and by disk drives for storage in the 1960s, but remained in specialized applications into the 1980s to finally disappear

Bubble and Charge Coupled Devices memories: bubble memory discovered in 1970 by Andrew Bobeck; introduced by many vendors in the 1970s; never succeed

Holography: architected by a lot of companies including Akonia Holographics, Aprilis, hVault, InPhase, Maxell for the media, Nitendo, Siros and Optware; in 2005, Optware and Maxell produced a 120mm disc that uses a holographic layer to store data to a potential 3.9TB; uses laser beams to store data in three dimensions; never really appeared on the market.

Optical tapes: behing these products, there was a lot of R&D by Creo, Docdata, Drexler Technolgy, EMASS, Group47 (DOTS), ICI/ImageData (media), Kodak, LaserTape, LTOS, MicroContinuum, Omass (Tandberg), Terrabank and others but finally for about nothing, one reason being a high priced drive and media; for example, the goal of the LOTS (Laser Optical Tape Storage) project in 1995 was to achieve a data transfer rate of at least 100MB/s to store more than 1TB on an IBM cartridge; Oracle continues to files regularly patents on drive and media

Reel-to-reel tapes: used for recording data in 1951 on UNIVAC- 1 and IBM 350 disk file in 1956; definitively stopped and replaced by tape cartridges

Ecrix tape drive: with smallest tape cartridge never seen from Sony; too pricey; short life and couldn’t replace any tape technologies

Disk packs: In October 1962 announced by IBM of the Model 1311 that reduced the media diameter introducing the concept of a removable disk pack that combined the direct access of disks; by 1969 Century Data, Memorex, Telex and others offered competitive 2311-like drives that accepted 1316 disk packs.; media suppliers include 3M, BASF, CDC, and Memorex, plus start-ups Athana, Caelus, and CFI sold compatible packs; new model disk pack drives, including non-IBM compatible versions such as the CDC Storage Module (SMD), continued to be announced into the 1980s; replaced by the mid-1990s as industry had completely turns to non-removable hard disk media (HDDs)

IBM Millipede: showed for the first time by IBM at CeBIT 2005; based on MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems), micro-motors on chip; never appeared on the market

Half-inch tape cartridges: IBM announced a major departure from traditional reel-to-reel tape in 1984 with its successful 3480 tape cartridge based on half-inch tape; the format attracted other producers including Fujitsu, M4 Data, Overland Data, StorageTek and Victor Data Systems who manufactured 3480-compatible products until the early 2000s, DEC, Philips and other vendors offering rebranded systems; 3480 18-track head family was extended to 36-tracks in the 3490E drive in 1991; replaced by other lower-cost types of tape cartridges, especially LTO, but IBM and Oracle continue to offer big libraries using this format; shrinking as all tape formats

QIC tape: for a while popular low-end backup cartridge pushed by 3M; ending as about all cartridge tape formats

DAT (Digital Audio Tape) or R-DAT or DDS: compact cartridge based audio tape format introduced by Sony in 1988 for storage then by Archive, Gigatape (with its own format and then adopting DDS), Hitachi, HP, Mitsumi and Sony; discontinued by Sony in 2005; progressively replaced like all helical scan tapes by other parallel tape cartridge technologies

DLT, Sony Super AIT DLT and Super DLT: promoted by DEC, the initiator, and then sold very successfully by Quantum (purchasing this DEC business in 1994) as DLT, much less by Sony; disappeared and replaced by LTO

Exabyte Mammoth tape: very popular for several years but not so reliable; replaced by DLT

Magneto-optical disk: rewritable optical disk emerging in 1990 but couldn’t compete with external HDDs and rewritable DVDs

Phase-change disk: Phasewriter Dual was introduced by Panasonic in 1995, the first device that used phase-change technology to store digital data on 12cm diameter media; then appear 5.25-inch discs using phase change recording; replaced by CD-RW and later DVD-RW/+RW and DVD-RAM

FDDs: 8-inch by IBM in 1971, then in 5,25-inch (Shugart) in 1976, and 3,5-inch formats in 1982; immense success but later stopped as too slow and not enough capacity

Floptical and Zip: Floptical by Insite Peripherals in 1991 and floppy disk storage system Zip by Iomega in 1994 with higher capacities than FDDs but finally disappearing

DECLINING

Removable rigid HDDs: launched by Imation, Iomega (Bernoulli in 1982, Jaz), IVDR, Nomai (in 1995), Overland-Storage, ProStor, Quantum, Syquest, etc.; replaced almost definitively by external HDDs (Overland-Storage last vendor to offer them)

LTO: Last popular tape cartridge format for several years but shrinking

Tape autoloaders: going down as disk subsystems were preferred

Tape librairies: continue to be offered by IBM, NEC, Oracle, Qualstar, Quantum and Spectra Logic, but only for high-capacity archiving solutions

Optical: In 1990 the first recordable CDs were introduced; CD, CD-R, CD-RW DVD+R-R-RW-RAM progressively replaced by USB flash keys, external HDDs and cloud, BD-R (Blu-ray Disc Recordable) and BD-RE (Blu-ray Disc Rewritable) now for archiving only

HDDs: first one being IBM 350 disk file in 1956 with fifty 24-inch platters and capacity of 5 million characters; now being continuously replaced by SSDs but for high-capacity magnetic drives; all HDD form factors disappearing but 2.5- and 3.5-inch; PMR to be replaced by HAMR and MAMR

RAID: now in competition with erasure coding

Interfaces: SAS and FC to be replaced by PCIe

GOING WELL

USB keys: invented by Israeli company M-Systems in 1995 under the name of DiskOnKey and continuing to be largely adopted as prices being low and dimensions small

SSDs: Fast growing market especially to replace HDDs

AFAs: storage subsystems based on flash only resurrecting storage industry

Cloud storage: Probably first commercial and popular cloud storage service coming about in 2006 as Amazon Web Services introduced their cloud storage service AWS S3; continuing to grow exponentially with a lot of offerings