4 ms·

A History of Hard Drives

109 points by LaSombra 10y ago

gist 10y ago
IIRC, the 70mb hard disk that we used in the mid 80's on a multiuser Unix (system V) system cost roughly $2000 at the time or $28 per MB in mid 80's dollars. Doing strictly work that was on green terminals and essentially accounting it was actually large enough to run a small business. The entire system cost was roughly 35k in 80's dollars including software and 10 terminals. Was fast and worked fine for it's purpose.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Not long ago I realized that the shop I was working for could fit its entire business on a smartphone.
mjevans 10y ago
The engineer from roughly half a century ago might consider you to be less crazy if you started by thinking of the number of atoms in a mole, and the number of atoms thus required to produce a sheet of metal. Then you could transition in to the incredible density that a wound up roll of magnetic tape must surely have, and postulate that if you could instead index it from the side like a record player's needle you'd end up with a rather massive storage density. Then you could explain that, more or less, such a thing had been done in this bespoke black box of highly advanced technology; and just look at these little bits on the circuits, electronic components of a tiny nature like you might see in some scifi film if you took apart a ray gun. Then you could say something about it either being alien, or more plausibly, time travel from the future being involved. I don't think you'd quite convince a scientist of the day that post-war research had continued at /such/ a remarkable pace of research as to allow that to be something produced by period technology.
cwisecarver 10y ago
I was really hoping for a description of MFM vs IDE vs SCSI. I guess I'll just have to hit up Wikipedia to refresh my memory.
- beautifulfreak 10y ago
  I was hoping for a story about giant magnetoresistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance
fernly 10y ago
If you are in Mountain View CA on a Wednesday afternoon, at 2pm at the Computer History Museum they demo a RAMAC. Under control of a laptop, it seeks and reads data written when it was still in use, 40 years ago. About 30 feet away is a nice 360/30 installation with a 2311 disk drive (non-functional). http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/ http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/
tonyplee 10y ago
"These days you can fit 2 TB onto an SD card." Any online reference on which product is this?
- girvo 10y ago
  It's not 2TB, but SanDisk announced a 1TB SD Card this year: https://mspoweruser.com/sandisk-announces-1tb-terabyte-sd-card-at-photokina-2016/ https://mspoweruser.com/sandisk-announces-1tb-terabyte-sd-ca...
agumonkey 10y ago
Reminds me of IBM photorec.
rzzzt 10y ago
The last paragraph was covered by 5 second films (historical accuracy not guaranteed): https://youtu.be/OVtKqdO7Jqo https://youtu.be/OVtKqdO7Jqo
kalleboo 10y ago
So for what you paid IBM monthly for 5 MB, today you can pay Amazon for over 600 TB (or 120,000,000 times more storage)
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  When I read that, I was thinking exactly that: how much cloud storage that amount of money could get you now.
dzhiurgis 10y ago
It is missing 1.8" drives that were used in iPods and original Macbook Air. And a bit obscure 1" microdrive, commonly used in CF shape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive And even more obscure 0.85" microdrive, apparently only used in Imation Micro Hard Drive USB drive.
- jaclaz 10y ago
  Never seen physically a 0.85" microdrive, or the Imation thingy, but I am familiar with the "normal" 1" IBM/Hitachi microdrive, they were at the time great little devices, not very "obscure", as a matter of fact relatively common. A blast from the past, one of them was used as mass storeage device on the original Matchbox WebServer: https://web.archive.org/web/20020601033615/http://wearables.stanford.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020601033615/http://wearables.... I still have somewhere a couple of these ones: https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microdrive.html https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microd... there is a 5 Gb Microdrive inside, with a USB bridge. The 0.85" one was made by Toshiba: https://web.archive.org/web/20060206172031/http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=8182000000070000000100006598000026b9/818200000b00000000010000659c000026ae https://web.archive.org/web/20060206172031/http://sdd.toshib... Incredibly the Imation Microdrive brochure can still be found: http://www.officeessentials.com/pdf/BR_MicroHD.pdf http://www.officeessentials.com/pdf/BR_MicroHD.pdf it was IMHO a very clever design.

109 points by LaSombra 10y ago

gist 10y ago

IIRC, the 70mb hard disk that we used in the mid 80's on a multiuser Unix (system V) system cost roughly $2000 at the time or $28 per MB in mid 80's dollars. Doing strictly work that was on green terminals and essentially accounting it was actually large enough to run a small business. The entire system cost was roughly 35k in 80's dollars including software and 10 terminals. Was fast and worked fine for it's purpose.

agumonkey 10y ago
Not long ago I realized that the shop I was working for could fit its entire business on a smartphone.

mjevans 10y ago

The engineer from roughly half a century ago might consider you to be less crazy if you started by thinking of the number of atoms in a mole, and the number of atoms thus required to produce a sheet of metal. Then you could transition in to the incredible density that a wound up roll of magnetic tape must surely have, and postulate that if you could instead index it from the side like a record player's needle you'd end up with a rather massive storage density. Then you could explain that, more or less, such a thing had been done in this bespoke black box of highly advanced technology; and just look at these little bits on the circuits, electronic components of a tiny nature like you might see in some scifi film if you took apart a ray gun. Then you could say something about it either being alien, or more plausibly, time travel from the future being involved. I don't think you'd quite convince a scientist of the day that post-war research had continued at /such/ a remarkable pace of research as to allow that to be something produced by period technology.

cwisecarver 10y ago

I was really hoping for a description of MFM vs IDE vs SCSI. I guess I'll just have to hit up Wikipedia to refresh my memory.

beautifulfreak 10y ago
I was hoping for a story about giant magnetoresistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance

fernly 10y ago

If you are in Mountain View CA on a Wednesday afternoon, at 2pm at the Computer History Museum they demo a RAMAC. Under control of a laptop, it seeks and reads data written when it was still in use, 40 years ago. About 30 feet away is a nice 360/30 installation with a 2311 disk drive (non-functional). http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/ http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/

tonyplee 10y ago

"These days you can fit 2 TB onto an SD card." Any online reference on which product is this?

girvo 10y ago
It's not 2TB, but SanDisk announced a 1TB SD Card this year: https://mspoweruser.com/sandisk-announces-1tb-terabyte-sd-card-at-photokina-2016/ https://mspoweruser.com/sandisk-announces-1tb-terabyte-sd-ca...

agumonkey 10y ago

Reminds me of IBM photorec.

rzzzt 10y ago

The last paragraph was covered by 5 second films (historical accuracy not guaranteed): https://youtu.be/OVtKqdO7Jqo https://youtu.be/OVtKqdO7Jqo

kalleboo 10y ago

So for what you paid IBM monthly for 5 MB, today you can pay Amazon for over 600 TB (or 120,000,000 times more storage)

theandrewbailey 10y ago
When I read that, I was thinking exactly that: how much cloud storage that amount of money could get you now.

dzhiurgis 10y ago

It is missing 1.8" drives that were used in iPods and original Macbook Air. And a bit obscure 1" microdrive, commonly used in CF shape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive And even more obscure 0.85" microdrive, apparently only used in Imation Micro Hard Drive USB drive.

jaclaz 10y ago
Never seen physically a 0.85" microdrive, or the Imation thingy, but I am familiar with the "normal" 1" IBM/Hitachi microdrive, they were at the time great little devices, not very "obscure", as a matter of fact relatively common. A blast from the past, one of them was used as mass storeage device on the original Matchbox WebServer: https://web.archive.org/web/20020601033615/http://wearables.stanford.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020601033615/http://wearables.... I still have somewhere a couple of these ones: https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microdrive.html https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microd... there is a 5 Gb Microdrive inside, with a USB bridge. The 0.85" one was made by Toshiba: https://web.archive.org/web/20060206172031/http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=8182000000070000000100006598000026b9/818200000b00000000010000659c000026ae https://web.archive.org/web/20060206172031/http://sdd.toshib... Incredibly the Imation Microdrive brochure can still be found: http://www.officeessentials.com/pdf/BR_MicroHD.pdf http://www.officeessentials.com/pdf/BR_MicroHD.pdf it was IMHO a very clever design.