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IBM Builds on 50 Years of Spinning Disk Storage
September 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the world's first commercial hard drive - the 305 RAMAC Computer, with its 350 Disk Storage Unit - that was designed and built right here in what would eventually become Silicon Valley. The Disk Storage Unit was introduced on Sept. 4, 1956, and the 305 RAMAC Computer was introduced on Sept. 13, 1956.
That first computing unit had a total memory storage capacity of a whopping 5MB on 50 24-inch platters.
"The digital photograph of Mona Lisa here in the slide show presentation is bigger than that!" joked IBM vice president of storage Barry Rudolph, who addressed a group of analysts and journalists at a half-day briefing at the company's Almaden Research Center, located in the foothills south of San Jose.
By comparison, the IBM System Storage DS8000 Turbo, introduced in August, can store up to 320 terabytes of information - the equivalent of all the images held in the Guggenheim, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more.
Another example of how things have changed: In 1956, the 350 Disk Storage Unit could hold the digital equivalent of the collected works of Shakespeare, while today's DS8000 could hold more than 76 million copies of Shakespeare's works.
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And now this:
1 Terabyte Optical Storage Disks the Size of a DVD
Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one. Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD.
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An old hard drive, supposedly from the 70's:
A blurb on it here, but some are skeptical of this article:
Link
A coffee table made out of an old hard drive:
