Happy Birthday Hard Drive

Dec. 20, 2006

This fall, the computer hard drive turned 50 years old.  First introduced back in the late ‘50s, it was so large that it took up a good portion of the room it was housed in.  Now, hard drives are
in everything from high-powered desktop systems to MP3 players to miniature memory keys that fit in your pocket. 
For many of us, it seems like computers have simply always been here–from playing “Oregon Trail” in grade school to routinely checking our email without a second thought, just as we check our mailboxes outside. But it hasn’t always been this way.
  Way back in 1956, IBM shipped the first hard drive in what was then called the RAMAC 305 system (RAMAC standing for the “Random Access Memory for Accounting and Control”). That drive held a mere 5 MB of data (that’s about enough space to store one song on one of today’s portable music players) at a cost of $10,000 per megabyte ($70,000 per megabyte by today’s values). 
Back in those days, people had to access information by spending hours searching through tape reels, so the team at IBM were simply trying to replace tape with a
better storage mechanism with random (read: easier) access to the stored data. 
IBM found that the best way to store data was to stack storage discs – but boy, did that take up the space; the system was as big
as two refrigerators. For a little
perspective, compare that to today’s compact laptop computers, which average around $1,000 for up to 100 MB. Hard drive, you’ve come a long way, baby - if 
you were to construct the 512MB iPod 
that exists now using 1956 technology,
that iPod would weigh over 204,000 pounds.  Not exactly pocket-friendly.
 
EVOLUTION
Although the RAMAC is a dinosaur compared with what exists today, it has to be credited with starting everything in the evolution of the hard drive.  The technology industry began to reinvent itself, and the government and large corporations began using these disc drives, which continued to reduce in size and increase in capacity as time went on. Disc capacity doubled about every two years, a remarkable 40 percent growth rate. 
Until the ‘70s, however, hard drives were still mostly the domain of bigger companies;  but with the advent of the PC - which we’ve probably all forgotten actually stands for “personal computer” - the average person suddenly became able to comprehend having a computer at home, even if that possibility was thousands of dollars away.
  Today, hard drives are in everything, and more things than you might expect.  Of course, there are the usual PC and music player considerations, but you’ll also find hard drives in video game consoles, cars, web-based email, video cameras, phones, and home theater equipment such as TiVos. The hard drive is one of the few technologies from the ‘50s that has not only survived, but has grown remarkably.
 BIG NUMBERS
Those in the know are predicting 200GB mini-drives for music and media players and 400GB drives for notebook computers by as soon as 2009.  Three terabyte drives are expected to be common just a few years later, for the bargain price of around $300.
 So what could they possibly come up with next?  Well, many futurists are hoping for things like holographic storage, but “regular” hard drives still have a lot of
life left in ‘em, if you can believe that.  Hitachi executives claim that 20 terabye drives are in the near future, with even denser drives possible;  which means you may never have to delete anything 
ever again. 
And flash memory is right behind the hard drive, offering a smaller and faster method of storage, although for now it’s also quite a bit more expensive. It’s all quite impressive compared to the
RAMAC, although, of course, poor ol’ RAMAC was revolutionary in its own time -  let’s just hope it’s still got enough computing power to blow out all 50 of those birthday candles.