Future is Digging History

Storage and Mahabharat

This topic introduces the storage system and tries to trace its usage back to Mahabharat, again the topic that best fit for the blog concept the "Future is Digging History".

First of all will discuss little bit about storage and small story from Mahabharat and then current evolution in the field of storage system and hence in Information Technology and Computer Science.

With the evolution of Information Technology the storage and retrieval of information became the crucial part of IT industry.

The modern storage(with reference to the storage explained in Mahabharat) began with paper pinch(permanent impression) and then magnetic tape, optical disc and flash media etc.

The idea of current storage system is to use two states(1/0 or +/- or anything that can be differentiated by two opposite states) to store informaion and then decode it.

HDD(Hard Disk Drive) has mechanical wear issues and led to evolution of SSD(Solid State Drive) and the next great concept is 2-D NAND and 3-D NAND i.e Flash drive and the roots lie in Mahabharat.

Below is the small story:

At the end of Mahabharat, when Bhishma Pitamaha was on death bed he knew the Krishna as a lord and started praising him with Vishnu Saharsanam (God's thousand names)psalm. Everyone was listening to that psalm and and at the end everyone found that it's very pleasant to chant that and wished if they could have noted it down.

Bhishma was about to die and it was not possible to repeat it again and no one was able to recall it completely with the same sequence.

Then they decided to praise lord Shiva(the master storage of universe and storage system lies here). The Shiva is described as Shuddha Sphatik(the pure silicon crystal and this is the basis for modern storage, and all electronic devices building computer technology).

They praised lord shiva and requested him to help recall the psalm that Bhishma has constructed. The Shiva told that the Sahadev the eldest among the Pandava has Sphatik mala(string) wore and this Silicon semiconductor metal has great properties to store anything that happens around it and can be retrieved and decoded with some meditation tactic.

The great sages that time learnt that technique and retrieved the Sahasranam psalm from the sphatik string.

The story above tells us that how the Silicon is important in the field of storage and computation. 

We know the evolution of Computer system from different mechanism of hardware to vacuum tubes and then diodes and transistors.

The modern computer system, smart phones and every single electronic device works with the use of semiconductor technology and sillicon is the most widely used semiconductor in this.

Coming back to storage systems below is the progress of storage:

1. DAS: Direct Attached storage which is RAM and ROM attached to out PC and laptops with SATA, PATA, USB etc.

2. JBoD

3. NAS: Network Attached storage which can be accessed in the network using TCP/IP network model with file system support

4. SAN: Strage Area Network: Special network that uses Fibre Channel, iSCSI etc instead of Ethernet for fast access at block level

5. RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks: The idea of having multiple disks for high availability and fault tolerance

Etc.

However the latest storage using NVMe(Non-Volatile Memory express) uses diodes(the basic block of logic gates) has a great durability and access speed.

These drives use 2D or 3D NAND technology to store 1 and 0s in the diodes supported by Silicon semiconductor.

Sillicon has a special property that can be used to make electricity flow through it with some modificaton and we got this idea from Mahabharat and may be available long back to it.

(NOTE: please let me know if my study is incorrect and leading to some misconceptions, not specific to this article but my all other articles too).

Conclusion:

The intent of this article was not to introduce the story from Mahabharat but to let you all know the importance of Silicon in the field of storage system and hence in Information technology and computer science. The little bit introduction to Storage system, however will have subsequent articles on Storage system as its scope is very vast being an emerging and growing technology.