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?"

Comments

Re:I predict

[nmb3000]

[automatic internal redundancy]

The problem I see with this is that (in my experience) there are several single points of failure in a hard drive, and if one of them goes the entire drive is toast. Specifically, the heads, the motor, and the controller board. I've had all three die on different occasions, and for all three the entire drive is dead. If the motor or controller board fails, then your data is fine, but you'll need to spend up to $1,000 (or more) to get the data off the drive. If the heads fail (mechanically or physically) there is a good chance that all the platters can be damaged so you're totally screwed.

In any case, aside from tons of bad sectors forming on the drive (in which case the entire drive is probably on it's way out) I don't see how an internal mirror can help much. You can't recover the data without going through an expensive data recovery service, so you may as well just buy a second physical drive, something that anyone can swap out and replace.

WTF kind of units are these

[sokoban]

"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.

Re:I predict

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I know it's not happening this year or next year, but I would expect that the real solution is going to be moving away from hard discs for storing important data.

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, and hopefully by then issues of Windows writing too often to drive will be fixed, as well as hopefully eliminating the need for a swap file.

This is all hypothetical. It's hard to know for sure when hard drive tech will run out of steam, right now, flash is uneconomical for mass storage, but I think it will become a major player in the notebook market in a few years, and a few years later in the desktop market, if that still exists. For all I know, save for gamers and certain power users, desktops as we know them may go away in ten years as the computer market is swinging towards notebooks pretty heavily.

Anyone serious enough about mirroring would do it on a separate drive. As others said, there are so many failure points in a drive that internal mirroring isn't going to work, especially if the spindle motor or bearings bust, or if the head controller or head arm motor goes bust. May as well have a second module. The price-conscious consumer market probably won't tolerate standardizing on a mirroring system even if it only adds $50 to the cost.

Re:Storage used to be really dangerous.

[OldManAndTheC]

+1 Funniest comment EVER