50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive 225
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."
Hard disk encryption for (c) holders? (Score:4, Interesting)
What the fuck is this, some new trusted computing drm scheme I never heard of?
...and when was the first hard drive crash? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know?
My first HD (Score:5, Interesting)
So it sits on my shelf, collects dust and I complain about not being able to throw it away... And my belly-aching about it started when I picked up my first video card which had more memory than my first hard drive. I'm sure those two events aren't unrelated.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! (Score:4, Interesting)
Not if the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA have their way,you won't. You'll RENT software, not own it, you'll pay-for-play music and video, and you will be THANKFUL for the privilege of doing so!
Thankfully, I think that the **AA and BSA will utimately lose.
Hard! (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying that the hard drive was invented 50 years ago implies that before that people used floppies. In fact, this was the first disk drive of any kind.
Re:As always.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:...and when was the first hard drive crash? (Score:5, Interesting)
50 Years later we're still using this nasty tech. (Score:5, Interesting)
I love these things and I hate them, as an enthusiast I've always been a big fan of the high performance hard disk. I've done my best to learn about them, I've theorised about ways of speeding them up, I've discussed the technology with friends for hours at a time in a geek like fasion.
As much as I love a fast hard disk and I love a big hard disk I also hate these hard disks, because ultimately it's a very old fasioned method of storing our data, it's just some magnetic disc spinning same as it did 50 years ago.
When you really think about it, it's just a really extreme tape drive with better random access, there's moving parts, it's delicate, they can run hot, they can be noisy etc.
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
What we need is to finally see the end of the hard disk, some new method of storing data, something which holds more, reads and writes faster, less delicate and no moving parts - of course solid state sucks right now but damnit I recall discussing holographic drives storing data on a small cube the size of a peice of sugar at 2tb or something (so the rumours went, like 5 or 10 years ago)
The oven had the microwave replace it with a whole new tech, the television had the LCD / plasma, sending data has gone (at points) from copper to light - cmon where's the magnetic storage replacement, something to put us in the 21'st century?
So in conclusion, I love them but I also hate them - it's really time for something new,...
Flying platters (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As always.... (Score:5, Interesting)
To get closer to the disk, many researchers are looking at actually running a disk with the slider in contact with the disk. From a mechanics standpoint, that's just frightening. When you think about the friction and wear this will cause on the nanometer thin films on a disk platter, the outlook it isn't all that good...
Now I will say that people have been predicting the demise of the hard disk drive for decades. For example, they never thought it would be possible to fly a slider at spacings less than the mean free path of air (~65nm) but HDD sliders currently fly with a minimum spacing of about 7-12nm. HDD Engineers have been able to overcome every major technical of the last 50 years and have, so far, won the cost per GB storage war. Even so, I'm curious how they'll get over the hurdles of the next decade as they're looking pretty frightening.
For the Engineers out there. (Score:3, Interesting)
Storage space? Try bandwidth. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've played around with the notion of there being "content neutral" downloading services, where people bring in their external hard drives, plug in, and download at very high speeds for a premium, returning in an hour or so (akin to having film developed). This may actually make sense at some point, provided the legal hurdles can be jumped.
Re:As always.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hard disk crash.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Stanford actually sued for $580,000 because of this crash and it not working within specifications. One bugbear was that it "cannot be used for longterm storage"!
Re:what boters me most... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorta like the video telephone. Easy to do, but nobody really wanted it.
Re:Flying platters (Score:3, Interesting)
A picture of the original Production Drive (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storag
I met Reynold Johnson about 15 years back, (he died a while back) he ran the first design program developing this thing.
Some did not believe in it's viability back then. Somebody posted a picture of a bologna slicer on the side of the engineering prototype. The only thing in common between the original and the current methods are spinning disks. Everything else has changed in its approach.
They have been predicting the demise of the disk drive for 20 years. However the cost per byte (or mega,giga,tera,peta-byte) of magnetic storage stays ahead of the cost curve, and thus perserveres.
Re:Punch Cards? (Score:3, Interesting)
5MB = 5 x 1024 x 1024 x 8 bits, which would require 43,690.67 cards. That's about 9 boxes of cards, at 5,000 cards per box; or 25 linear ft of 'deck' . I'd say the punch card density was about 4 times better than the hard drive (not allowing for the size of the card reader/punch though).
At 1,000 cards per minute read speed (although some readers ran at 1,400 or better) it would require 44 minutes just to read the cards, i.e. a transfer rate of 16kps. It would be challenging to play an MP3 off that.
Now. imagine Vista on punch cards...
RAMAC was a dead end (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My first HD (Score:3, Interesting)
Those things lasted. However, it could have been different if the intahwebs and bittorrent had been available at the moment
Re:...and when was the first hard drive crash? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As always.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose the main reason all this is worrying though is that you have something sliding over your data at 50m/s. All that's protecting the integrity of the data is a layer of lubricant (~1.5 nanometers or a few molecules thick) and a layer of diamond like carbon (DLC, ~1 nm). If your lubricant layer gets too thick, you might have trouble reading or writing data to the magnetic layer of your disk. If your lubricant layer gets too thin, you risk cutting through your DLC. At that point, it's time to restore from backups. It's just a very delicate problem.
The sky certainly isn't falling but it's a tough game. Luckily there are a lot of smart people playing. It's looking like flash will probably win over the mobile storage market (cost, power consumption, robustness). It'll be fun to see what happens on our desktops and servers.
Re:As always.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Big disk drive (Score:5, Interesting)
Each disk drive was about the size of a large computer desk and had a capacity of 262KB which is not very much compared with today's disk drives. But compared to a hollerith card it was a lot of storage when comparing to the 80 bytes or even a deck of cards. The operating system at the time was 2K in size which was one box of cards and could easily be contained on the disk drive platter.
By keying in the bootstrap program at the console and pressing "run" then the system would read from a particular location on the disk drive which was the location of the operating system. The program would then execute the code in core and thus the system was up and running.
The worst failure would be a ruptured hydraulic hose spewing hydraulic fluid over the entire guts of the machine. Difficult to clean up... difficult to hold onto slippery parts... and difficult to repair.
There was only limited electronics in the disk drive itself. The controller was a refrigerator size box that held each gate on a separate circuit board. These were troubleshot utilizing a oscilloscope on a cart so it could be moved about. Each input to a gate had a test point and the output(s) also had test points. Each gate (like and, nor etc) was an individual small PC board so a disk controller might have 600 boards in it. One needed to be totally aware of each circuit and how it worked and what the signal at each junction was to be. No board swapping here. One had to know or have a very good idea what the problem was before changing a board lest you have a contoller that is nearly unfixable in very short order.
I was very skilled at repair and yet saw the writing on the wall even then as devices became smaller and "smart".
No longer could one trace the signal from "turn on" button to spindle rotating through each stage and gate. Eventually the "start" button would signal the input to the processor aboard the disk drive and it would be the processor that commanded the spindle to start turning. At this stage troubleshooting became board swapping for the most part.
That is when i moved from the technical hands on realm into programming.