For hundreds of years, any organisation that needed to store information relied on one tried and tested technology: paper. But since the advent of computing and digital data storage, more and more data has been captured and stored electronically in digital archives. But now organisations need to retain archived data for longer – for business and regulatory reasons – can storage technology keep up? No computer system is older than 80 years, but there are industries that face the prospect of archiving data for 100 years or more. And, with the operating lifespan of a standard hard drive at just three to five years, IT departments need to know how to store data for future generations: so-called indefinite storage.

A byte of data has been stored in a number of different ways through the years as newer, better, and faster storage media are introduced. A byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly refers to eight bits. A bit is a unit of information that can be expressed as 0 or 1, representing a logical state. Let's take a brief walk down memory lane to learn about the origins of bits and bytes. Going back in time to Babbage's Analytical Engine, you can see that a bit was stored as the position of a mechanical gear or lever. In the case of paper cards, a bit was stored as the presence or absence of a hole in the card at a specific place. For magnetic storage devices, such as tapes and disks, a bit is represented by the polarity of a certain area of the magnetic film. In modern DRAM (dynamic random-access memory), a bit is often represented as two levels of electrical charge stored in a capacitor, a device that stores electrical energy in an electric field. In June 1956, Werner Buchholz coined the word byte to refer to a group of bits used to encode a single character of text. Let's address character encoding, starting with ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII was based on the English alphabet; therefore, every letter, digit, and symbol (a-z, A-Z, 0-9,, -, /, ",!, among others) were represented as a seven-bit integer between 32 and 127. To support other languages, Unicode extended ASCII so that each character is represented as a code-point, or character; for example, a lowercase j is U 006A, where U stands for Unicode followed by a hexadecimal number. UTF-8 is the standard for representing characters as eight bits, allowing every code-point from 0 to 127 to be stored in a single byte. This is fine for English characters, but other languages often have characters that are expressed as two or more bytes.

Samsung has announced super-fast removable data storage cards that could one day replace the slower micro-SD cards in devices. The UFS card, based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard, will come in capacities from 32GB to 256GB. The storage media could be used in cameras, drones, robots, virtual reality headsets and ultimately, even mobile devices. There is a need for faster and high-capacity removable storage in electronics, and UFS media fits that requirement. UFS cards can blow away micro-SD media in performance by moving data in and out of the card much faster.

Samsung has announced super-fast removable data storage cards that could one day replace the slower micro-SD cards in devices. The UFS card, based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard, will come in capacities from 32GB to 256GB. The storage media could be used in cameras, drones, robots, virtual reality headsets and ultimately, even mobile devices. There is a need for faster and high-capacity removable storage in electronics, and UFS media fits that requirement. UFS cards can blow away micro-SD media in performance by moving data in and out of the card much faster.