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The Hard Drive Turns 50

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-it-still-feels-10 dept.

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?"

5 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. I predict by grasshoppa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
  2. A funny memory about hard drive memory by Brickwall · · Score: 5, Interesting
    While a student at the University of Toronto in the late 1970's, my fraternity (mostly engineers) invited a professor for a dinner. We retired to the library afterwards with a case of beer, and I ventured the comment "Won't it be great when you can get a desktop computer with 1 Mb of RAM, and a 10 Mb hard drive?".

    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
    1. Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory by merreborn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A friend's grandfather actually worked at the San Jose IBM lab back in the days when they were working on early drives -- I think he just turned 88 this month.

      At any rate, he talked my ear off for an hour once, talking about how they'd spent a bunch of time trying to figure out the optimal height above the platter to float the head at. He said they used a jet of compressed air under the head to float it, not unlike an air hockey puck.

      Long story short, if they really were working on these things in this scale back in those days, I can't say I can blame your professor -- you might as well have been talking about flying cars and having an entire meal in a single pill. I mean, hell, drives these days hold millions of times more data than they did just a couple of decades ago. I don't think anything's ever miniaturized that fast.

    2. Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Alright, so he wasn't a visionary but I think you can point to most computer scientists in the 1940s-1970s and laugh
      "You didn't have a clue how far computers would go".

      Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1980s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far Internet would go".

      Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1990s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far wireless connections would go".

      Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 2000s and lau... oh wait, that's us. I'm not exactly sure what they'll be laughing about, put I'm pretty sure they will. It's really easy to mock technological predictions with 20-20 hindsight. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going for a trip in my flying car driven by cold fusion...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Big bits by NMBob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.