The Hard Drive Turns 50 154
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?"
I predict (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:I predict (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok fellow geeks. What are everyones' predictions about what computer storage will be like in 50 years? Include capacity, medium, and whatever else you want.
My guess is with organic/biological storage with essentially unlimited capacity - if you need more just grow more.
Re:I predict (Score:3, Interesting)
On my mental list of potential failure points, damage to the platter doesn't rank very high.
Other than the occassional bad sector, if you're going to get data corruption (or physical damage), your data is going to get FUBARed on both platters.
I agree with your conclusion about more intelligence, just not the notion that a one-drive RAID-1 would make any sense.
Personally, I'm waiting for them to cram 2 opposing sets of read/write arms (or even just a second set for reading) so that they can effectively halve the latency and seek times without having to go faster than the existing 15k screamers.
Kinda makes me wonder why ideas like the Kenwood TrueX 72x [techreport.com] (or 52x) never had enough money thrown at them to work the bugs out.
Big bits (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I predict (Score:3, Interesting)
For a short time Seagate made a series of drives with dual head assemblies for transactional processing but they were not cost effective. I do not remember how the interfacing worked.
Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:4, Interesting)
At any rate, he talked my ear off for an hour once, talking about how they'd spent a bunch of time trying to figure out the optimal height above the platter to float the head at. He said they used a jet of compressed air under the head to float it, not unlike an air hockey puck.
Long story short, if they really were working on these things in this scale back in those days, I can't say I can blame your professor -- you might as well have been talking about flying cars and having an entire meal in a single pill. I mean, hell, drives these days hold millions of times more data than they did just a couple of decades ago. I don't think anything's ever miniaturized that fast.
Re:3-peat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:4, Interesting)
"You didn't have a clue how far computers would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1980s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far Internet would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1990s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far wireless connections would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 2000s and lau... oh wait, that's us. I'm not exactly sure what they'll be laughing about, put I'm pretty sure they will. It's really easy to mock technological predictions with 20-20 hindsight. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going for a trip in my flying car driven by cold fusion...