On September 13, 1956, the hard disk drive was born. It’s interesting to note that TV and the Hard Disk Drive are both 50 years old, and in 2006 they are finally coming together as never before.

Who needs blank tapes or DVDs when you can record and playback with a hard drive? Visit this site for some information on the image you see at the bottom left, representing the hard drives of decades ago. The one on the right represents a much more modern hard drive of today.  

In 1956, the first hard disc storage device looked like something out of “War Games” – a machine that weighed a ton (literally), was bigger than two large refrigerators and had a maximum capacity of 5 megabytes. The large hard drives you see at the picture above on the left are clearly later models than the ones first available in 1956.

Fast-forward 50 years and a drive that fits into the palm of your hand can hold hundreds of gigabytes of video, movies, games, music and other digital data. They’re in iPods, there are versions for cars that can handle rough road conditions, GPS devices use hard drive to store all of the US or all of Europe on a single hard disk, some mobile phones and even in the latest video cameras from JVC and Sony.

While flash memory is posing a challenge, hard disk storage is still the cheapest way to go when you want to store dozens and especially hundreds of gigabytes of information.

A few exta factoids supplied by Seagate:

- The first hard disc storage device, introduced in 1956, used 50 24-inch platters to store 5 megabytes of data, or about 2,500 pages of text. Today, a pocket-sized device using a single 1-inch platter can store 12 gigabytes of information, more than 6 million pages of the same text.

- By 2020, that same thumbnail platter will be able to hold 500 million pages of text.

- Data density, the amount of information that can be squeezed into a square inch of hard disc space, has increased 65 million times since 1956.

- The hard drive industry expects to ship more drives in the next five years than it did in the previous 25 as the amount of digital content and the number of business and consumer devices designed to create and use it continues to explode.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 2:00 am under Storage.

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