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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 can see in 10 years from now instead of medium like disks (dvd, bluray, hd-dvd, cds) everything will be stored on harddrives because of the constant advances in technology.
"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..." ...this probably means that we're about to hit a development wall. We know how good experts are at predicting these kinds of things.
With a terabyte HDD, I surely hope they finally find some way to dramatically increase the transfer rates. We haven't seen much change in that in quite a while.
That linked page shows a pic of the guy who wrote the story, several ads for magazines etc, an illustration with some distant link to the story, but what we all want are some pics of those huge disks. What's up with all those newspaper guys, haven't they learned yet that the web loves pictures? They (and by that I mean nearly every website of a newspaper all over the world) as if they just moved all their text-only content to the web without understanding those amazing new possibilities in the first place - and with the web now over 10 years old, I'm really starting to doubt if they will ever learn.
Then you have the interesting problems of random access to the cards and re-writable cards.
Not criticizing you, just taking the idea further.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
"Kryder of Seagate and Healy of Hitachi assure us that new disk-drive features like built-in encryption will protect copyright holders and our own personal records."
so the drives themselves will prevent us from copying media TO them and/or prevented us from copying stuff FROM them ?
what's the potential for abuse here ? try to upgrade to windows BlindenessXP2010 with a leaked key and it'll tell the HD to lock all your files... scary though, isn't it ?
no thanks. i want my terabyte SATA IV disk to be a plain data storage thingie with no stings attached or any sort of "copy protection" or encription. I'll handle data-protection on software myself
What ? Me, worry ?
Well, let's see... apologies in advance for getting the numbers wrong, I always mess up my conversions (but it doesn't matter as you'll see at the end).
But 5 Mb = 5 242 880 bytes = 41 943 040 bits (that is assuming I got it right)
Now, I don't know exactly what sort of resolution you had on punch cards, but it's probably fair to assume that, including padding, a centimeter squared would do per bit. so you need 41 943 040 cm^2 = 4 194.304 square meters of punch cards. Now say, just for the sake of the argument, that your punch cards are 30x 30 = 900cm^2, you would need 46 603.3777.... of them. And then it all boils down to how thin your punch cards can be, but just intuitively, I'd say, yeah, you can easily fill up that space with 5Mb worth of punch cards.
But then again, you are missing the entire point. Punch cards are not rewritable, hard disks are and that is the innovative bit. So it doesn't matter whether or not you can put punch cards in that space, it's all about being able to reuse said space.
Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use.
A kid will fill it with games, a teenager will fill it with pr0n, most my friends will fill it with movies. I will fill it with random versions of package sources; molecular biologists I once built a 17TB array for filled it with copies of already processed detector output -- instead of deleting them, they left them "just in case".
Capacity is irrelevant, the time is pretty much constant.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Computer data is a gas; It expands to fill its container.
=Smidge=
"Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use."
That isn't true in my experience. Every hard drive I purchase gets harder and harder to fill up. Remember back in the DOS days? I do. My first HD was 40 megs. I was ALWAYS backing up to floppies. Not out of fear the drive would die, but because I was always having to move things on and off the HD to because of the limited space. That problem has been less and less severe over the years. HDs, for me, are rising in size faster than I can change my data downloading habits to keep them full. That may or may not always be true, but I'm drawing from over 10 years of computing here.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use.
That's rediculous and absolutely not true. No home user or business I know goes through storage at that rate. In fact your average business user still uses less than 20GB of total storage on average in your typical small/medium business with a network server. And when we do capacity planning for server upgrades we typically see AT LEAST 2 YEARS time before the array would be filled. Your typical business owner/manager would never tollerate having to go through server storage migration ever other month! Sure, perhaps in the specialized area of scientific research something like this would be acceptable.
Home users might eat up space faster what with MP3s, photos, and DV cam movies. But even then I don't see my friends or family replacing their drives at a pace of 1-1.5 months! Maybe every year or two.
Perhaps this was a type-o and you meant 1-1.5 YEARS? That would seem more realistic...