Hard Drives – old and new

30

Seeing this huge 5MB hard drive being loaded into a plane in 1956 on TechEBlog puts modern technology into perspective. We think nothing of installing and using hundreds of gigabytes in our new computers. Or expect them to be small enough to fit onto our MP3 players. Will we look back 50 years from now and laugh at our “modern” miniature drives?

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30 Comments


  1. Believe it or not, I actually have seen some of these in our little museum at work.


  2. Holy Crap. I want that table soo bad it not even funny.


  3. Cool table! I want one! !_!


  4. Ha, i should fish out my old 256Mb


  5. Reading this article this morning really made me think about the direction mass storage devices
    are heading. For instance sure we can make really small hard drives that fit in the palm of your hand, but the only problem is they are still hard drives….they have moving parts, and are limitted to the performace of the moving parts. I really think the future of storage devices are going to be in some form of solid state storage. One could almost do a page just like this one, but be about the evolution of the USB flash drive. Any ways sorry for the long post, just wanted to express my thoughts.


  6. I remember when I bought my first 1gb drive in the late 90s and I thought that was awesome compared to the 10mb drive I had in my 286 in 1989.

    For $150 today, you can buy a *flash* drive that contains sixteen times the amount of space as the typical *hard* drive only a decade ago and about 3,200 times as big as the 5MB mammoth seen in the first photo above. And again – that’s just a *flash drive*.


  7. the shapes are cool


  8. wow… Did that say $400 for a 6gb in 2003? That seams like alot.


  9. 2006 actually. Must’ve been a microdrive. Not exactly a fair comparison price-wise, but it’s the size that’s important.


  11. I wonder how many worker’s comp claims there were with hardware designers back then? I bet when the 10MB hard drive was pitched at the R&D meeting many people cringed as the pain in their backs exploded.


  12. I remebmer when I bought my first 540 mg hard drive in 1994. My friends asked me what I was going to do with all that hard drive space.


  13. TG should produce a necklace with a fake harddrive about the size of that small one


  15. These things are cool!


  16. I love that table!


  17. I want that table!



  19. how much data does that table hold?
    I assume it is a real hdd platter, so im guessing 1mb….


  20. I would hate to have to change heads on one of those old drives, modern drives are hard enough as it is, and we dont require a crane these days!


  22. it has been said before, and i am going to say it again – I WANT THAT TABLE!!!!! 😀



  26. It took a FORKLIFT to pick up that old 50s hard drive, imagine what the COMPUTER looks like! YIKES!!!


  27. They look way overpriced


  28. Wayyyy back I worked for a company who made HDDs. A 10MB drive at time had a 12″ platter, and a colleague’s job was to get the heads flying closer to the surface for greater data density. The result of the overnight runs where the heads were just that bit TOO close were quite spectacular.


  29. The picture showing 40 MB in 1985 costing $40,000 is waaay off. Around 1982 we interfaced a 8″ Quantum Q2040 40 megabyte drive to our Alpha Micro. The drive cost just a few $thousand.

    By 2006, weren’t 6GB drives obsolete?

    Mike

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