Celebrating the 55th Anniversary of the Hard Disk

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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It’s been a long hard road for the hard disk drive, but the device has reached the top of its game after 55 years in existence. The original commercially released unit by IBM looked more like an old jukebox rather than a modern day HDD, but it was a start. The unit leased for $38,400 a year and held a whopping 5MB storage capacity. You’ve come a long way, baby! Happy anniversary :cool:
 
wow, 5 megabytes for a thing -that- big? :eek: What kind of technology did they use? Etching enlarged pictures of small text code that was previously written on a piece of paper?
 
And I thought the old one I had was a beast! Tore it apart to have fun with the platters, weighed about 40 pounds and the platters were about 12" across. I wish I could remember the storage capacity.. I know it wasn't good though! Never did anything worth taking pictures. They are probably still laying around in the parts heap somewhere. Looking back I probably could have made a nice little wind turbine out of the magnets though.
 
Mr. Perfect said:
Hopefully it will retire at 65. :p
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Why? While HDDs may be much slower and less energy efficient than SSDs, their storage density is matched only by magnetic tape. Which, by the way, is still used for massive archiving in data centers.
 
Mad Cat said:
Why? While HDDs may be much slower and less energy efficient than SSDs, their storage density is matched only by magnetic tape. Which, by the way, is still used for massive archiving in data centers.
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Not to mention much cheaper per GB.
 
A 50 platter drive today could hold 50TB. That's 10,000,000 times more, and today the platters themselves are much smaller too.
 
MajorDomo said:
It’s been a long hard road for the hard disk drive, but the device has reached the top of its game after 55 years in existence. The original commercially released unit by IBM looked more like an old jukebox rather than a modern day HDD, but it was a start. The unit leased for $38,400 a year and held a whopping 5MB storage capacity. You’ve come a long way, baby! Happy anniversary :cool:
Click to expand...

Reminds me of the hard drives from Corvus I worked on when I started in the computer business.
If you remember the name must be as old as I am:)

Dual 8" platters for 20 mb. Sounded like a jet engine when it was running.
3 circuit boards the size of ATX motherboards, covered with components.
If you needed to replace one of the boards, you had to fiddle with 3 seperate adjustments, using a dual trace scope, until the signals lined up.

People would connect these to apple II's and format the drive into a bunch of floppy sized volumes.
 
Cheers to a proven and (these days) inexpensive technology. HDDs will continue to serve us well for a long, long time.
 
travbrad said:
I wonder how this compares to good old paper in storage density.
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It was shown in an article i read before. Each magnetic bit is about a square centimeter (or a bit bigger, maybe 2cmx1cm)
 
Mr. Perfect said:
Hopefully it will retire at 65. :p
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That not going happing
SSD has major disadvantage vs a conventional harddrive
1: Retrieve your Data, when a SSD go south all of your data is lost (gone for good) unlike a conventional harddrive becuases 99% of the time you can Retrieve all of your data off harddrive.
2: Cost $$ really expensive $$
 
Mr. Perfect said:
Hopefully it will retire at 65. :p
Click to expand...

it's always going to be around as a cheap alternative, until SSD raises the capacity, and lowers the prices to what you can get at the current edge of HDD capacity, Hard drives will be around for a while.
 
The HD will be 65 ten years from now in 2021. Think back ten years to 2001, what did you have? A 40GB harddrive?Maybe 80GB of 100GB if you really spent some cash? That sounds a lot like SSDs today, with most people grabbing a 128GB OS + App drive and supplementing it with a commodity mechanical. A decade from now both the SSD will be significantly further down the product life cycle graph.
 
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