How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years

Lucas123 writes "Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs. As much data as the digital age creates (2.16 Zettabytes and growing), data storage technology has always found a way to keep up. It is the fastest growing semiconductor technology there is. Consider a microSD card that in 2005 could store 128MB of capacity. Last month, SanDisk launched a 128GB microSD card — 1,000 times the storage in under a decade. While planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, technology such as 3D NAND and Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) hold the promise of quadrupling of solid state capacity. Here are some photos of what was and what is in data storage."

Comments

Re:How long id a song

[Fweeky]

Why always picking on the HD manufacturers? Your GigE network runs at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, what a scam!

Memory is measured in multiples of powers of two because that's how the addressing works. Disks and network have no such fundamental limitations - they count in sectors and frames, which are themselves not necessarily powers of two.

1952 typo?

[Tablizer]

in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song

Where is that 1952 date coming from? It wasn't commercially available until about 1956, in limited quantities, and as best I can tell, it's from a research project that started in 1953 with the goal of testing the various storage possibilities, disk being one of many. Thus, it's not likely that working prototypes would be available until about 1954 or '55.