12/22/2023 0 Comments Disk archive storage cabinetsInterestingly, today both maximum and “normal” storage may have the same physical size, which definitely wasn’t the case back in 1980. Note: To estimate the normal size HDD on the chart, we used the data regarding the average capacity of Seagate hard disk drives.Īs you can see, the gap between a normal versus a top-of-the line hard disk drive in terms of storage space has become much, much smaller than in the past. If we had used a regular, linear scale, the columns for 1980 would have been less than a pixel high. Each step on the Y axis is 10 times larger than the one below it. Note that we have used a logarithmic scale in this chart. To illustrate the tremendous increase in storage space we have seen in the last 38 years (essentially since the birth of personal computing), we’ve made a 1980 vs. Ten years later, in 1990, a “normal” hard drive ( like the ones produced by Maxtor) held about 40MB, with more expensive options able to store more than 100MB.įast forward to present day, and you can buy a 3.5-inch hard disk drive with 15TB of storage space. We went from needing a special room for the hard disk drive and its computer, to having one we could fit inside a desktop computer. This is coincidentally also the size of the first “small” 5.25-inch hard disk drive that arrived in 1980. The first hard disk drive (RAMAC 305 produced by IBM) back in 1956 could store 5MB of data, which was a huge amount at the time. The earliest drives installed in these machines, available since 1980, were 5MB in size and had a form factor of 5.25 inches ( Seagate ST506).įor a visual on how hard disk drive sizes have changed since the ‘80s until today, have a look at the below image with an old 8-inch drive all the way down to today’s 3.5-inch, 2.5-inch, and 1.8-inch drives.Ībove: Three decades of shrinkage. It gave users rapid access to a large amount of data, thanks to transferring information at three million characters per second.Ībove: The disk drive module of the IBM 3380.Įarly in the ‘80s, after the first microcomputer Altair 8800, smaller “consumer” hard disk drives designed to be used with the increasingly popular personal computers (now known as PCs) started to appear. Its cabinet was about the size of a refrigerator and the whole thing weighed in at 550 pounds (250 kg). It was called the IBM 3380 and could store 2.52GB (“2.52 billion characters of information,” according to IBM). IBM introduced the first hard disk drive to break the 1GB barrier in 1980. Entire rooms were already set aside for the computers.Ĭase in point, here below is a 250MB hard disk drive from 1979.Ībove: State-of-the-art hard disk drive from the ‘70s. Hard disk drives were normally used together with big mainframe computers, so this wasn’t such a big deal. Yes, that’s ONE hard disk drive unit.Īlthough hard disk drives kept improving, state-of-the art disks were built according to the concept “bigger is better” well into the ‘80s. This hulk of a storage unit could store a whopping 5MB of data.Ībove: An IBM Model 350 Disk File being delivered. It had 50 24-inch diskscontained inside a cabinet that was as large as a cupboard and anything but lightweight. It was called the IBM Model 350 Disk File and was a huge device. The first hard disk drive, like so many innovations in computing, came from IBM. ![]() ![]() We’ll examine the radical changes over time for three different aspects of HDDs: size, storage space, and price. This article looks back at how hard disk drives have evolved since they first burst onto the scene in 1956. The world of SSDs offers even more space of at least 100TB. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.įast forward 10 years, and in 2019 the largest commercially available HDDs can store at least 15TB of data. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1TB (terabyte, i.e.
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