How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years

Posted by timothy on Friday March 14, 2014 @04:50PM from the megaleaps-and-gigabounds dept.

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."

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1993 by Solandri · 2014-03-14 20:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.

"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."

Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.