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.