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The Hard Disk Drive turns 50
Fifty years ago today, on Sept. 13, 1956 IBM shipped the first Hard Disk Drive (HDD) from its laboratories in Silicon Valley.
The refrigerator-sized IBM RAMAC 650 HDD used 50 24-inch metal disks coated with magnetic iron oxide paint and could store 5 megabytes of data.
The RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) 650 weighed in at 2,100 pounds and required several people to move it onto a truck. The per-platter capacity of the RAMAC was a microscopic 100Kbytes and the whole product was priced at $7,000, which translates to about $1.4 million per gigabyte of storage.
Compare this to today€™s HDDs, some of which are small enough to fit into a shirt pocket at just 0.85-inches in diameter, that have capacities of up 750Gbytes; contain as much as 160Gbytes of data per platter and cost about 50 cents per gigabyte.
According to IBM, about 2,000 units were sold in 1956 and the RAMAC 650 was sold for 13 years until 1969. Today€™s HDDs are only sold for about two years, illustrating the rapid pace of technological change in the industry.
The HDD industry has grown dramatically over the past 50 years. Krishna Chander, senior analyst, storage systems for iSuppli , predicts worldwide HDD shipments will amount to 425.6 million units in 2006, more than 200,000 times the number that IBM sold in 1956.
Soon after IBM€™s introduction of the RAMAC, Alan Shugart founded Seagate, the first company devoted to the HDD business and for thirty years the number of HDD manufacturers grew. By 1986, iSuppli says there were more than 70 HDD suppliers in existence; however, ruthless competition has whittled that number to only eight today.
iSuppli predicts the global HDD industry will expand to 731 million units by 2010, driven by increasing usage in multiple markets including computers, consumer electronics, mobile phones and automobiles.
The RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) 650
Fifty years ago today, on Sept. 13, 1956 IBM shipped the first Hard Disk Drive (HDD) from its laboratories in Silicon Valley.
The refrigerator-sized IBM RAMAC 650 HDD used 50 24-inch metal disks coated with magnetic iron oxide paint and could store 5 megabytes of data.
The RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) 650 weighed in at 2,100 pounds and required several people to move it onto a truck. The per-platter capacity of the RAMAC was a microscopic 100Kbytes and the whole product was priced at $7,000, which translates to about $1.4 million per gigabyte of storage.
Compare this to today€™s HDDs, some of which are small enough to fit into a shirt pocket at just 0.85-inches in diameter, that have capacities of up 750Gbytes; contain as much as 160Gbytes of data per platter and cost about 50 cents per gigabyte.
According to IBM, about 2,000 units were sold in 1956 and the RAMAC 650 was sold for 13 years until 1969. Today€™s HDDs are only sold for about two years, illustrating the rapid pace of technological change in the industry.
The HDD industry has grown dramatically over the past 50 years. Krishna Chander, senior analyst, storage systems for iSuppli , predicts worldwide HDD shipments will amount to 425.6 million units in 2006, more than 200,000 times the number that IBM sold in 1956.
Soon after IBM€™s introduction of the RAMAC, Alan Shugart founded Seagate, the first company devoted to the HDD business and for thirty years the number of HDD manufacturers grew. By 1986, iSuppli says there were more than 70 HDD suppliers in existence; however, ruthless competition has whittled that number to only eight today.
iSuppli predicts the global HDD industry will expand to 731 million units by 2010, driven by increasing usage in multiple markets including computers, consumer electronics, mobile phones and automobiles.
The RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) 650
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