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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?"
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.
We're already on the way with SMART, with many (most?) drives having reserved sectors that get mapped over bad sectors when they crop up. This won't be able to recover lost data, but a drive that verifies writes could re-write a sector that didn't make it to disc on first attempt.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
It may be a decade before most people switch to some form of non volatile memory for new purchases, but I would expect it to be reliable enough
Yes, but still not impervious to Rhinoceros attacks, which are very very common where I'm from (Florida). And what about when the glaciers slide off Greenland all at once and cause the 300ft tsunami all around the world, then where will your data be? Underwater, that's where.
The greenland thing is actually possibly going to happen, as the water pools on top of the glaciers, the refraction causes faster melting, and the water has been leaking down between the glaciers and creating a slick that could cause the glaciers to--if they suddenly broke off--slide into the ocean within a few minutes. FYI, peeps. I know this is OT, but I'm moving inland.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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.