Hard Drive History

Sept 2006 marked the 50th anniversary of hard disk storage. When IBM delivered its first hard disk on Sept thirteenth, 1956, few would have imagined the impact it might have on our daily lives. The RAMAC was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. It took an air compressor to safeguard the heads, had pizza sized platters and was able to provider a then a whopping 5 megabytes of information. Today you may do everything with a pocket drive.

What is more - the RAMAC was accessible to lease pound & for, 18, 500, the equal of �, 134, 500 in today's pounds. 25 years on, the initial hard disk drive for computers was invented. Employing the MFM encoding system, it held a 40MB capacity and 625 KBps data transfer rate. A version of the ST506 interface switched into the RLL communication system, allowing for increased storage capacity and speed. IBM made scientific history on twelfth August 1981, with the launch of their first personal computer - the IBM 5150. At a cost of �, 830 the 5150 had just 16K of memory- just enough for a small sum of emails.

It's hard to conceive that as lately as the late eighties 100MB of hard drive space was considered ample. In today's age, this could be totally inadequate, hardly enough to set up the OS, let alone a large application like Microsoft Office. When asked about the limitations of the ancient Personal Computer, Tom Standage, business editor of Economist magazine, says: it is hard to imagine what folks used in connection with computers in these days because by contemporary they could not do anything." . As a consequence of those significant breakthroughs, the sector has grown from several million disk drives annually from the 50s to over 260 million drives annually from 2003.

In this period, the cost of magnetic disk storage has decreased from �, 1, 088 per megabyte from the 1960 to 0.03 pence today. The future seems bright. Currently, the standard 3.5 inches desktop drive can provider up to 750 gigabytes in information. But disk drives are set to become even smaller, more strong and less costly. According to Bill Healy, the head in Hitachi, drives containing hundreds of gigabytes will be little enough to wear as jewelry. You'll need with you every record and tune you have ever purchased, every picture you have ever taken, each tax record." . Having five disk drives on your home is becoming more and more commonplace: PCs, laptops, game systems, reg & TiVo, video recorders, iPods - just to mention a couple. Experts believe that someday families will consume up to 15 disc drives, some of which might seem in your Television set, cell phone or car. In fact, the business is likely to deliver as many readers into the subsequent 5 years as it did from the last 50 decades.