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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?"
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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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
I used hard drives back when they were only 10 bits and the size of two human hands. You had to signal to the computer which bits you wanted to be on and which you wanted to be off, by moving your fingers up and down. It was pretty tough.
(128 and 4 were also illegal values, a further limitation of this system)
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
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