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50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive
ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."
I was just curious about how big a bit is going to be on these new drives, so I did a quick back of the envelope calculation (I actually used a scrap of paper bag.)
Let's take jewlery-sized to mean 1 cm^2 of usable area. And take 100s of GB to be 100 GB, or 10^11 bytes, so ~10^12 bits. Pop these in a 10^6 x 10^6 grid. Then we have 10^-2 / 10 ^ 6 = 10^-8 m to be the length/width of a bit. A hydrogen atom is ~ 10^-10m (I think Iron is ~2.5 times that size). So roughly, bits would be a maximum of 100 x 100 atoms, but probably more towards 50 x 50.
That is pretty small!
another beautiful thing about the internet: google image search!
http://images.google.com/images?q=ibm+ramac
check this out:r st-hard-drive-5mb/
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fi
its an ibm document about the drive (and some other hard ware)
It has a picture, and some more technical info!
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
wikipedia has a nice article on the subject, here, with at least one great picture.
or google image, like suggested above, though it is disappointing the original article didn't have pictures of the giants