Hard Drive Memory Lane

Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."

Comments

Urban legend about magnet range

[Flying pig]

I can assure you that two magents that fit into a 5.25 inch hard drive would not collide from a foot apart horizontally. The attraction law for magnets is very roughly inverse cube (NOT inverse square, because there are two poles not one). In fact (and I tested it) the magnets from an old WD SCSI drive would come together from between one and two inches apart, and believe me that is quite a lot for magnets with very close poles. However, it is perfectly true that if these ceramic magnets are allowed to come together they can shatter.

In fact, the magnets are the most useful things in junk hard drives - they can be used for all sorts of little jobs - but as hard drives get ever lighter and more efficient the magnets get ever less useful. Old SCSI drives are the best. A standard IBM 9Gbyte drive contains two magnets with a holding capacity which would cost over $50 from the hardware shop.