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The Hard Drive Turns 50
JHU writes "When the hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1956, it required a humongous housing and 50 24-inch platters to store 1/2400 as much data as can be fit on today's largest capacity 1-inch hard drives. Back then, the small team at IBM's San Jose-based lab was seeking a way to replace tape with a storage mechanism that allowed for more-efficient random access to data. The question was, how to bring random-access storage to business computing?"
Has anyone run HD Tach on that original IBM hard drive?
I seem to recall reading this story TWICE before this one!
0 6/07/30/2124225], but I KNOW there was a second one.
I've found one of them: [url:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
I used a hard drive when they were the size of a suitcase.
That's nothing. I used a hard drive when they were the size of a VW and held only 64 bytes. That's bytes not kb.
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
I've got a few in my flying car.
At some point in the future, capacity will take a back seat to recoverability ( for the average consumer ). To that end, I predict harddrive companies effectively setting up a raid 1 array on a single drive; Probably by platter. To the host system, it would appear as a single drive of 160gb ( for example ), but it would actually be two platters of 160gb, with a bit for bit copy being maintained on the fly by the drive itself.
Access would be through a standard API.
Extending this further, we could add even more intelligence to the drives, and with the sacrifice of more storage space, would could have the drive taking care of shadow copies ( this operating under the assumption that the host system knows how to handle the drive ).
This is the direction I predict for future harddrives; At some point we will come to a place where we don't really need the extra capacity. At that point the harddrive manufactures will begin to add more intelligence to the drives.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The prof thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He listed the following "fundamental physics" reasons why these devices would be impossible:
1. You could never make the magnetic domains small enough to get that density
2. Even if you could, you could never make stepper motors precise enough to read the data.
3. Even if you could, you could never make read/write heads sensitive enough to read such small domains.
4. Even if you could, you could never make a disk which rotated stably enough to prevent head crashes.
5. As for the RAM, he said we could never make chip densities high enough to get 1 MB on a desktop.
6. Even if you could, the heat generated by those RAM chips would require a small refrigerator.
7. And finally, even if you could make the transistors small enough, you would get so many tunneling errors that the RAM would be completely unreliable.
I wonder if he's seen an Ipod Nano yet...
What was once true, is no longer so
My father talks about his younger days with the US Air Force as a mid-level computer technology worker in Anchorage. He speaks of how dangerous magnetic storage was in the early days, with all that weight in a drum, spinning up to 1200 RPM. We still jokes about the emergency procedures in the event of a catastrophic mechanical failure of operating storage media. The USAF's official line was to take cover in a corner behind other heavy equipment at the first sign of trouble. Techs used to work under constant threat of going three rounds with bouncing betty. Now all we have to worry about are laptop batteries.
See Drum Memory
FairTax baby!
It's kind of a strange coincidence that the codename for the hard drive project was Ethel because the same day that these huge hunks of iron were debuted was the day that Hurrican Ethel formed in the Gulf of Mexico (it made landfall the next day in Mississippi).
These days we're talking about capacities that can hold all the information of every hurricane evar on a single disk. What a ways we've come.
50 Years on we have so much hard disk space available we just don't know what to do with it all.
I invoke godwin's law.
"The question was, how to bring random-access storage to business computing?"
"just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers"
Then, you can randomly retrieve data by just yelling out your search terms!
When I was in high school (1970's) our computer programming/math teacher had a hard drive disk platter that might have been from one of the these machines. I seem to recall that it was larger than 24" in diameter, but maybe I was just smaller. Anyway, the disk had some silver powder on it -- magnetic I'd guess -- and you could actually see the individual bits. They were pretty thin, but the tracks looked to be about 1/8" wide/tall.
We are practicing the ever present software harddrive array here on Slashdot...let's further increase the redundancy by striping this story across other sections.
At 50 years old I bet it's more floppy drive than hard drive.
"1/2400 as much data as can be fit on today's largest capacity 1-inch hard drives"
Really now, that is almost completely uninformative since most people have no idea what the capacity is of today's largest 1 inch hard drive. I know that it is cool and all how much storage has shrunk, but I think just saying 8 megs (or whatever the storage capacity was) tells people more than saying a fraction of an obscure unit.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Now, the question is how to best make use of the *non*-random-access storage that business computing has available? Most people think of hard disks as random access, but really they're not -- there's a huge performance penalty for random reads and writes. A disk that can do many tens of MB/s of sequential reads can only do maybe 200 4kB sector reads per second. That's a *huge* difference. So much so, that it's almost free to just read a bunch of sectors before or after the requested sector, in hopes they will get used. Companies providing high performance storage products struggle a great deal with figuring out how to avoid large numbers of small random IOs, and how to actually make use of the available bandwidth when the user is requesting small blocks at a time.
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http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I remember working with fixed hard drives (i.e. non-removable) that were 500 MB, and larger than washing machines.
...
...
I remember having colleagues who broke their feet after removable hard drives fell on them (those were only 200 MB, but HUGE
The same place I worked at had XT like PCs with external hard drives in shoe box sized housing.
Those were from the mid-80s by the way
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September 14th, 1956: The first time porn is loaded onto a Hard Drive
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
My GrandPa had a whole stack of the 24" diameter HDs. We came across them as we were cleaning out his barn (there was a fire, or they would still be there) They where closed in giant plastic rectangles, looked kinda like large rackmount servers.
How fitting... one of mine died today. We barely knew ye.
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While your professor friend was being a fool Richard Feynman was writing "THere is plenty of room on the bottom". See if you can find his paper. He predicited densities much higher.
Please note the stupid post got modded +5
IBM had dual heads on some of their drives. This was done years ago.
I expect we'll see an array of r/w heads instead. If we read and write 8 bits at a time then the drive looks like it spins about 8x faster. The thing is the rotational delay is the same but you read or write 8x the data per rotation.
I had a client suggest this on a $4000 drive a few years back. Their data was more improtant than $8000 (cost of two (2) drives to experiment with)
Drives keep track of bad sectors and remapped bad sectors. This might not be kept on the hard drive - IE - it could be kept on the controller board in ECC memory. I was never able to find out.
Next - the positioning might be via servo information on the platters themselves and if so then the swapped controller should be fine. But if the manufacturer used some sort of dead reconing system such as timming the track to track seaks then head positioning _might_ be a problem.
I don't know but I can see that there might be problems.
...my hard drive turns 7200!
. . . to my birthday! I'll be 40 tomorrow. (Sep15)
If there was one piece of hardware I'd like for my birthday present, it'd be 2GB of RAM for my laptop. There's something I'm older than: DRAM ICs.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It was fryed during a storm by a power peak. Batches didn't change so fast that days so at a friend's shop we were able to find a suitable controller. We did the change and the drive is yet working today.
Old school technology rules.Recycle with Nas
I can just re-post my opinion from last time it was posted, C&P is so much easier than thinking.8 13665
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192615&cid=15
Oh hard drives how you curse me.
I love these things and I hate them, as an enthusiast I've always been a big fan of the high performance hard disk. I've done my best to learn about them, I've theorised about ways of speeding them up, I've discussed the technology with friends for hours at a time in a geek like fasion.
As much as I love a fast hard disk and I love a big hard disk I also hate these hard disks, because ultimately it's a very old fasioned method of storing our data, it's just some magnetic disc spinning same as it did 50 years ago.
When you really think about it, it's just a really extreme tape drive with better random access, there's moving parts, it's delicate, they can run hot, they can be noisy etc.
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
What we need is to finally see the end of the hard disk, some new method of storing data, something which holds more, reads and writes faster, less delicate and no moving parts - of course solid state sucks right now but damnit I recall discussing holographic drives storing data on a small cube the size of a peice of sugar at 2tb or something (so the rumours went, like 5 or 10 years ago)
The oven had the microwave replace it with a whole new tech, the television had the LCD / plasma, sending data has gone (at points) from copper to light - cmon where's the magnetic storage replacement, something to put us in the 21'st century?
So in conclusion, I love them but I also hate them - it's really time for something new,...
Only 50 turns? Mine does 7200rpm, I think.
Being from the 'Land Downunder' it hard not to ignore another technological milestone that is also turning 50 this year. What technology am I talking about? Why its the humble television. Being the backwater country it was back in 1950's, it wasn't until 1956 that Australia finally got television. As of this year Australians as a whole have been through 50 years of television. It is sad to say many of those pioneering TV presenters have long pass on, but such if life. So as we celebrate the 50 year harddrive, also remember that 50 years ago Australia finally entered the age of Television.
Grammer Nazi, I choose you!
Special Attack: Clean up the parent post.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
Hard disk.
All drives are "hard"
A floppy disk drive (FDD) drives a disk that's flexible, though the drive is hard.
A hard disk drive (HDD) drives a disk that's hard.
I know, I know, there are no floppy drives anymore, but some of us still remember.
The term "hard drive" didn't exist before the 90's when everybody got a PC for home & work.
And my 60GB IBM Deskstar died yesterday. IBM quality?
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It was worse in England. 6 was also illegal.
Or is it 12? (Have I got it round the right way?)
Whatever, it was illegal and thousands of cameras would watching for it - after all it was England
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Great, just what we need. Storage that's vulnerable to millions upon billions of strains of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Yes, I see that one going down real well in the history books. You can't write A/V software for that, pal. You'll need a REAL DOCTOR to fix your computer, and then it's not even guaranteed that the data you'd have would be there, it being potentially damaged by biological toxins.
Sorry, but even Star Trek: Voyager addressed this idea (since the Voyager used neurological bio-packs for data transfer/storage.) You open yourself up to a whole new world of shit and frustration when you move to biological storage. It may be fast, but a mere rhinovirus could wipe out your entire database. No thanks, I'll stick with risking my data against human ingenuity rather than place a bet against mother nature.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You might look into recruiting Spelling Stormtrooper as well. Last I saw, he was hanging around with Komma Klansman.
Definitely the best comment of the week, maybe month.
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It just doesn't fit in the case anymore... http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/169885320/ (mouse-over image)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com