Technology, as a whole, has come a long way over the years. The devices that we have today were probably unimaginable to those living just thirty years ago. Computers have improved, cell phones are now essentially small computers, and all these devices will just constantly get better. At the backbone of nearly every technological device is its hard drive. These too, have gotten considerably better over the years. When I was younger, floppy disks were still a thing. Today we uses extremely small microSD cards, or, no physical component at all as many opt for cloud-based storage. Regardless of what you use, memory and hard drives are still very important as they are found in practically all of our devices. However just 35 years ago, a 128GB microSD card that’s smaller than a dime was unheard of, as 1GB hard drive’s weighed over 500 pounds.
It’s really easy to take what we have today for granted, as the technology of the past is practically amusing compared to what exists in current times. Something that will really make you laugh, is looking at the history of hard drives. The first example of a hard drive as we are familiar with can be traced back to 1956. IBM had been working for many years to create a computer and hard drives, and it was in that year that they were first successful in constructing a hard drive. But given the fact that this was years ago, it was extremely rudimentary. The first hard drive was shipped into their basic RAMAC 305 computer system. It had about a 5mb capacity, was about the size of two refrigerators (the whole system that is), and the memory was priced at about $1o,000 per megabyte. Depending on the length and quality, that’s enough memory to store about one .mp3 song, and again, the system was the size of two refrigerators. So at the time, hard drives were cumbersome, expensive, and inefficient.
This progression of hard drives and computers would remain fairly the same for many years to come. IBM was pretty much the only company at the time making massive developments and improvements within the world of computers and memory. It wasn’t until 1963 that IBM came up with the first removable hard drive, known as the IMB 1311. This was revolutinary at the time, as users of computers no longer needed to attempt to transport refrigerator sized devices. These devices had six, 14-inch disks that could hold up to 2.6mb of data in total. This translated to about 2 million characters back then, still even though it was “portable”, the device weighed about 10 pounds.
IMB would continue to refine the hard drive throughout the 1970’s, and a new company by the name of Seagate would enter the scene. In 1979, Seagate would introduce the revolutionary ST-506 hard drive and computer system. This was truly the first hard drive that could realisitcally be considered “portable”, as the unit had a 5.2-inch form factor. These devices, while small, still had limited memory capabilities. The ST-506 started at around $1,500 back then and had about 5MB of storage space. So sure, hard drives were getting smaller, but many wondered if they would ever offer larger storage options.
Then in 1980 everything change. IBM had created a hard drive that had the largest capacity ever achieved by man: 1GB. That seems hysterical given what we have now, but it was groundbreaking at the time. It was called the IMB 3380, and it was the highest capacity drive that money could buy you at the time. Actually the unit was larger than 1GB as it could store up to 2.52GB of memory, since IMB actually combined two 1.26GB drives into one unit. While its memory capacity was revolutionary, everything else about it was still ancient. The unit weighed about 550 pounds, it was extremely large, and it costed around $59,000…back in 1980. That’s over $170,000 dollars today! So while the device could hold a lot of memory back then, it was still extremely impractical and expensive.
Over the years a variety of companies like IBM, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital would advance the hard drive to make them smaller, lighter, more affordable, and able to hold more memory. During the 1990’s we saw the rise of hard drives that average consumers could practically use and afford. Today hard drives are considered outdated technology as we use solid state drives more and more frequently. SSD’s, while they are more expensive, are faster and smaller than hard drives. They are also not as prone to failure like hard drives are. Since there are no moving parts in a SSD, they’re more practical for mobile computing. My current laptop has an SSD in it takes about 4 seconds to boot up; if I had a hard drive, it would take a lot longer. Now we can get microSD cards that have 128GB worth of storage. These little cards can easily fit into our phones, are extremely fast, fairly affordable at around $80 dollars, and weigh less that 0.3 ounces. When you compare them to the first 1GB drive, we have certainly come a long way in hard drive technology.
Photo from aphelis.net
