
A History of Hard Drives - LaSombra
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/history-hard-drives/
======
mjevans
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.

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

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fernly
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/)

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dzhiurgis
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
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....](https://web.archive.org/web/20020601033615/http://wearables.stanford.edu/)

I still have _somewhere_ a couple of these ones:
[https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microd...](https://www.memoryc.com/externalharddrives/tone5gbusb2microdrive.html)
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.toshib...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060206172031/http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Path=8182000000070000000100006598000026b9/818200000b00000000010000659c000026ae)

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.

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cwisecarver
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
I was hoping for a story about giant magnetoresistance.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance)

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

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

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

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

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agumonkey
Reminds me of IBM photorec.

