Huge 1GB IBM Hard Drive

This is a 1GB IBM hard drive from about 20 years ago. Wow how technology has evolved! Do you think that the engineers of the day would guess that today we would have more than a hundred times that storage in your pocket which also by the way has a color screen, battery and the smarts to make it play audio and video? Here are some other hard drives to gaze upon. ๐Ÿ™‚

Via: Zedomax

10 Comments


  1. Those old hard drives were better. My music sounded better and my pictures were more crisp.


  2. You can actually get smaller–MicroSD is 1/3 the size of that SD card. I have a 2gb one in my phone full of MP3’s.

    Not to mention if you ditch a form factor the actual size of the memory chip can be something like only a couple of mils square.


  3. one its huge, two that thing looks like a giant motor or somthing from a scifi movie



  4. You can only use this when you have access to an 15 500 kV power line.


  5. I’ve actually got one of those sitting in my guest bedroom closet! It’s an old IBM 3380. My father used to work for IBM and he was sent to the local electric company to replace these (working) drives with new ones as a precautionary measure (the 3380’s were prone to failure). They were just going to throw the “old” ones away, so he kept one. It’s still in working order and probably still has customer records stored on it… Anyone want to help me get it working again? ๐Ÿ™‚


  6. I dismantled one of these and salvaged a switch panel and a voice coil magnet. The magnet is outrageous – it’s heavy and extremely strong. I used it to erase discarded floppies… The switch panel is nice: a ready-made hinged panel populated with about 25 single and 5 double 3 A circuit breakers.


  7. This is the HDA (Head and Disk Assembly) from a 3380 Model J. It’s not 1gig, it’s only 630Mb.
    It looks the same as the 3380K that was released at the same time, but the 3380K a capacity of 1890Mb. The advantage of the model J, was that it had a very fast seek time of 12ms.
    The HDA was driven by a 3 phase motor and connected to the HDA via a flat belt that ran around the pully at the front of the photo.

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