50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive

ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."

Who needs this thing,

[mobby_6kl]

I'll never use up so much space!

At last...

[Sixtyten]

Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home.

Finally, hard drives big enough to run Windows Vista will exist.

5MB?

[kimvette]

Five MEGABYTES? Holy crap! My 5.25" floppy disks only hold 170K!!

(my thoughts during the reign of Commodore)

Re:...and when was the first hard drive crash?

[Ohreally_factor]

When one of the janitors tried to wash the towels in it and didn't balance the load properly. After that, the HD had a tendency to vibrate hard enough to move across the room.

5.25" Floopy drives????

[OzPeter]

When I was a youngen we only had 8" drives .. and we liked it.

Actually I last used 8" drives in a commerical system in 1986 . not so long ago.

"small enough to wear as jewelry"

[mrAgreeable]

Yeah, because the hard drive is the new bling [hitachigst.com].

Butterfly test

[viking2000]

In 1990, we had some brand new HP disks the size of a washing machine. Capacity 650MB.

Some software was written to move the head assembly from end to end. This would cause so much vibration the the whole machine would "walk" around.

The machine room had video cameras, and sometimes if you saw some maintenance people in the machine room, you would launch the "Butterfly test" on all the drives. They would come alive like a bad horror movie, and all walk around. The poor maintenance person would try to run out befor the exit got blocked.

Re:Who needs this thing,

[Anonymous Coward]

I download all of my internets right when I turn on my computer. That way I can read the internets later. I didn't realize internets were so big.

Re:As always....

[Skevin]

It's not so much peta-bytes I'm interested, falafel-bytes. Mmmm yummy!

(unless we're talking about the other kind of peta-bytes, the ones associated with animal rights people...)

Solomon

Re:Who needs this thing,

[duke12aw]

as a 17 year old i can speak from experience. you are 100% correct but there are also video games. maybe if i uninstalled the video games i would get the real thing.... wait a minute! i think i had an epiffany!

Re:50 Years later we're still using this nasty tec

[ijakings]

To quote the mighty bash.org

[ikkenai] i don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers
 

Re:At last...

[Anonymous Coward]

And certain Linux distros...

Re:Punch Cards?

[Baricom]

Now. imagine Vista on punch cards...

The first two boxes of cards check that they're being run on the correct reader, and that they're Genuine (TM) IBM cards. Then, the next 500 boxes get fed into the machine, only to gum up the feed mechanism before anything productive gets done.

Re:For the Engineers out there.

[Misfit Taz]

- How much would one of these refrigerator drives hold today if they used the cutting edge
- write strategies we use today?

2 eggs, a block of cheese and a couple of cans of mountain dew.