In 1962 removable disks were created, and this was a major advancement in computer technology because users could now save to disks without having to worry about not having enough space on their magnetic tape drives. Over time, the disks evolved from large floppy disks, to 3"5 floppy disks, to CD-ROM's, to the latest disk technology, DVD, and still going.

The problem with the 3"5 diskettes were capacity. They can only hold less then three megabytes of data at most.

Recently, digital cameras and other devices that require portable memory units have used things called Smartmedia cards. These cards can hold up to about 16 megabytes of data, and even that will soon increase. Also, the size of a smartmedia card is drastically smaller than a 3"5 diskette. Hopefully, smartmedia cards will replace 3"5 diskettes on computers, so that everyone can benefit from a lot of memory in a small device.