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The Hard Drive Turns 50
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Sep 13, 2006 09:55 PM
from the but-it-still-feels-10 dept.
from the but-it-still-feels-10 dept.
JHU writes "When the hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1956, it required a humongous housing and 50 24-inch platters to store 1/2400 as much data as can be fit on today's largest capacity 1-inch hard drives. Back then, the small team at IBM's San Jose-based lab was seeking a way to replace tape with a storage mechanism that allowed for more-efficient random access to data. The question was, how to bring random-access storage to business computing?"
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50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive 225 comments
ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."
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Speed testing? (Score:3, Funny)
3-peat? (Score:2)
I've found one of them: [url:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=
Helps prove the point that (Score:4, Funny)
50 Years on we have so much hard disk space available we just don't know what to do with it all.
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let the one-upsmanship begin! (Score:4, Funny)
That's nothing. I used a hard drive when they were the size of a VW and held only 64 bytes. That's bytes not kb.
Re:let the one-upsmanship begin! (Score:5, Funny)
(128 and 4 were also illegal values, a further limitation of this system)
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18 9 18 9
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Back in my day, all our data was stored on an 8x8 grid of bits you had to read and toggle by hand. That's 64-bits of storage, and we liked it that way! [swipnet.se]
Kids these days, with your teletypes, and multi-kilobyte video games.
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Quite seriously, though... I remember working out that with some of these drives - presuming you could 'see' magnetic charge - /would/ have visible bits. Very cool, in a dorky way - I can imagine looking at something with 'xray specs' and being able to see a pattern.
Hard Drive Turns 50! (Score:2, Funny)
I predict (Score:5, Interesting)
Access would be through a standard API.
Extending this further, we could add even more intelligence to the drives, and with the sacrifice of more storage space, would could have the drive taking care of shadow copies ( this operating under the assumption that the host system knows how to handle the drive ).
This is the direction I predict for future harddrives; At some point we will come to a place where we don't really need the extra capacity. At that point the harddrive manufactures will begin to add more intelligence to the drives.
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Re:I predict (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I see with this is that (in my experience) there are several single points of failure in a hard drive, and if one of them goes the entire drive is toast. Specifically, the heads, the motor, and the controller board. I've had all three die on different occasions, and for all three the entire drive is dead. If the motor or controller board fails, then your data is fine, but you'll need to spend up to $1,000 (or more) to get the data off the drive. If the heads fail (mechanically or physically) there is a good chance that all the platters can be damaged so you're totally screwed.
In any case, aside from tons of bad sectors forming on the drive (in which case the entire drive is probably on it's way out) I don't see how an internal mirror can help much. You can't recover the data without going through an expensive data recovery service, so you may as well just buy a second physical drive, something that anyone can swap out and replace.
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Ok fellow geeks. What are everyones' predictions about what computer storage will be like in 50 years? Include capacity, medium, and whatever else you want.
My guess is with organic/biological storage with essentially unlimited capacity - if you need more just grow more.
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Why would that be at all useful?
On my mental list of potential failure points, damage to the platter doesn't rank very high.
Other than the occassional bad sector, if you're going to get data corruption (or physical damage), your data is going to get FUBARed on both platters.
I agree with your conclusion about more intelligence, just not the notion that a one-drive RAID-1 would make any sens
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For a short time Seagate made a series of drives with dual head assemblies for transactional processing but they were not cost effective. I do not remember how the interfacing worked.
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That's not going to help you if the motors and/or onboard circuitry dies. Which i
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It may be a decade before most people switch to some form of non volatile memory for new purchases, but I would expect it to be reliable enough, and hopefully by then issues of Windows writing too often to drive will be fixed, as well as hopefully eliminating the need for a swap file.
This is all hypothetical. It's hard to know for sure when hard d
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Yes, but still not impervious to Rhinoceros attacks, which are very very common where I'm from (Florida). And what about when the glaciers slide off Greenland all at once and cause the 300ft tsunami all around the world, then where will your data be? Underwater, that's where.
The greenland thing is actually possibly going to happen, as the water pools on top of the
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My prediction would be that in 10-15 years, consumer machines don't have hard drives at all as solid-state memory achieves terabyte sizes and the number of rewrites ceases to be an issue.
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My guess would be that failure of physical platters or read-heads account for perhaps 10% of all hard-disc crashes.
Having two platters with the same data will do nothing for you when the drive-electronics die. When the motor driving the spindle has a problem, when the stepper is no longer able to align the read-heads properly.
A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:5, Interesting)
The prof thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He listed the following "fundamental physics" reasons why these devices would be impossible:
1. You could never make the magnetic domains small enough to get that density
2. Even if you could, you could never make stepper motors precise enough to read the data.
3. Even if you could, you could never make read/write heads sensitive enough to read such small domains.
4. Even if you could, you could never make a disk which rotated stably enough to prevent head crashes.
5. As for the RAM, he said we could never make chip densities high enough to get 1 MB on a desktop.
6. Even if you could, the heat generated by those RAM chips would require a small refrigerator.
7. And finally, even if you could make the transistors small enough, you would get so many tunneling errors that the RAM would be completely unreliable.
I wonder if he's seen an Ipod Nano yet...
Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:4, Interesting)
At any rate, he talked my ear off for an hour once, talking about how they'd spent a bunch of time trying to figure out the optimal height above the platter to float the head at. He said they used a jet of compressed air under the head to float it, not unlike an air hockey puck.
Long story short, if they really were working on these things in this scale back in those days, I can't say I can blame your professor -- you might as well have been talking about flying cars and having an entire meal in a single pill. I mean, hell, drives these days hold millions of times more data than they did just a couple of decades ago. I don't think anything's ever miniaturized that fast.
Parent
Lots of room on the bottom (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A funny memory about hard drive memory (Score:4, Interesting)
"You didn't have a clue how far computers would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1980s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far Internet would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 1990s and laugh "You didn't have a clue how far wireless connections would go".
Then you can point to most computer scientists in the 2000s and lau... oh wait, that's us. I'm not exactly sure what they'll be laughing about, put I'm pretty sure they will. It's really easy to mock technological predictions with 20-20 hindsight. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going for a trip in my flying car driven by cold fusion...
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Storage used to be really dangerous. (Score:5, Funny)
See Drum Memory [wikipedia.org]
Re:Storage used to be really dangerous. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Storage used to be really dangerous. (Score:5, Funny)
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I think back in those days porn was stored on wetware, or paper
Code name was Ethel (Score:3, Informative)
These days we're talking about capacities that can hold all the information of every hurricane evar on a single disk. What a ways we've come.
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(emphasis mine)
I'll be pedantic.
You're not thinking big enough. ALL of the information would be the location of every molecule of air, etc at every point in time during the hurricane. For that, we would need a hard drive as massive as the hurricane for each point in time. I think we would quickly run out of mass in the universe if we stored ALL of the information.
Big bits (Score:3, Interesting)
Not so hard at 50 (Score:4, Funny)
WTF kind of units are these (Score:3, Insightful)
Really now, that is almost completely uninformative since most people have no idea what the capacity is of today's largest 1 inch hard drive. I know that it is cool and all how much storage has shrunk, but I think just saying 8 megs (or whatever the storage capacity was) tells people more than saying a fraction of an obscure unit.
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Yeah might as well go for the "sidewalks to the moon" or "statue of liberty on is side" compa
And it comes full circle... (Score:2)
Now, the question is how to best make use of the *non*-random-access storage that business computing has available? Most people think of hard disks as random access, but really they're not -- there's a huge performance penalty for random reads and writes. A disk that can do many tens of MB/s of sequential reads can only do maybe 200 4kB sector reads per second. That's a *huge* difference. So much so, that it's almost free to just read a bunch o
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No Wireless. Less space than an iPod. Lame. (Score:2)
Yes, it has been a fun ride ... (Score:2)
I remember having colleagues who broke their feet after removable hard drives fell on them (those were only 200 MB, but HUGE
The same place I worked at had XT like PCs with external hard drives in shoe box sized housing.
Those were from the mid-80s by the way
Even more historical (Score:3, Funny)
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