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."

Comments

Hard!

[fm6]

Usual /. sloppiness with language. What we call a hard drive uses Winchester Technology where the drive platters are sealed in an airtight contain. Ubiguitous now, but anybody old enough remembers the old big drives where the platters were bare, like modern floppies. Very sensitive to dust.

Saying that the hard drive was invented 50 years ago implies that before that people used floppies. In fact, this was the first disk drive of any kind.

Re:As always....

[iPatch]

Exactly. I'm wondering who these experts are anyways as we're about to hit a major wall in the next decade. We've been reducing the spacing between the transducer (read-write element) and magnetic media in HDD for about 50 years now. Each year the transducer gets closer to the disk and, as a result, storage densities have been going up. However, within a few years, we won't be able to get closer without having to worry about intermolecular forces that come into play at spacings below 5nm. These can cause serious flying problems for a slider in a hard disk drive.

To get closer to the disk, many researchers are looking at actually running a disk with the slider in contact with the disk. From a mechanics standpoint, that's just frightening. When you think about the friction and wear this will cause on the nanometer thin films on a disk platter, the outlook it isn't all that good...

Now I will say that people have been predicting the demise of the hard disk drive for decades. For example, they never thought it would be possible to fly a slider at spacings less than the mean free path of air (~65nm) but HDD sliders currently fly with a minimum spacing of about 7-12nm. HDD Engineers have been able to overcome every major technical of the last 50 years and have, so far, won the cost per GB storage war. Even so, I'm curious how they'll get over the hurdles of the next decade as they're looking pretty frightening.

A picture of the original Production Drive

[loose electron]

Heres a picture of the original production version:

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage /storage_PH0350A.html

I met Reynold Johnson about 15 years back, (he died a while back) he ran the first design program developing this thing.

Some did not believe in it's viability back then. Somebody posted a picture of a bologna slicer on the side of the engineering prototype. The only thing in common between the original and the current methods are spinning disks. Everything else has changed in its approach.

They have been predicting the demise of the disk drive for 20 years. However the cost per byte (or mega,giga,tera,peta-byte) of magnetic storage stays ahead of the cost curve, and thus perserveres.