Storage Capacity

Storage Capacity

What Does Storage Capacity Mean?

Storage capacity refers to the specificamount of data storage that a device or system can accommodate. This criticalmeasurement is commonplace in consumer-facing IT and also in designing enterprisesystems or other larger systems to function properly.

In order to precisely represent storagecapacity, IT professionals and others use terms like kilobytes, megabytes andgigabytes. In the earlier days of computing, storage capacity, or disk space,was often measured in kilobytes. As new storage media began to accommodate thestorage of digital image and video, megabytes quickly replaced kilobytes, andgigabytes quickly replaced megabytes. New storage capacity measurements areoften presented in terms of hundreds of gigabytes.

One major advance in storage capacity hasbeen powered by something called solid-state design. In more primitive datastorage hard drives, data was encoded into the physical drive on a platter andread by a stylus as that platter revolved. Now, many of these types of harddrives have been replaced by a solid-state storage system. In solid-state datastorage, large amounts of data can be written on very small storage mediathrough the use of silicon or similar materials and various chemical elementsthat provide charging at a molecular level to encode data. This process iscalled doping. Assessing storage capacity is a major part of providing upgradesto systems. It's also part of looking at the most fundamental advances in ITmanufacturing that will power the next generation of devices and systems.