History & Evolution of Hard Drives

Hard Disk Drives are in use from a long time. All the computer systems or the laptops which you are using these days have hard drives present in them. Hard Drives are great devices for storage. When the world is turning out to use Solid State Disks (SSDs) for storage, there is nothing that can replace hard drives. They are still being one of those small devices that are being used for storing data in the large form. It would have been really difficult to store the data if hard drives would not have been there. But do you know the history of the hard drives? From the time the Hard Drives were developed, the new changes and evolution in it have been brought a lot of times. Here, we are going to share with you about the revolution of hard drives.

Invention First Hard Drive

The engineers of IBM at San Jose California Laboratory are the ones who invented the hard drive in the year 1953. They have developed a lot of things related to computers before they invented the hard drive. It was the first hard drive and was named Random Access Storage at that time. At present, we do call it secondary storage also, but back then the term given to it was ‘Random Access File’. The engineers very soon understood the application of the device and brought it in the world. In the computer’s hierarchy, a new name was added among the name of the other storage devices. But this storage device was a bit different than the other storage devices. As hard disk drives were very cheap or you can say less expensive at that time. But their capacity to store the data was high. This is also one of the reasons why engineers invented this device.

Hard Drives Evolution

As we have already mentioned above also, that technological changes were brought with a rapid state soon after the first hard disk drive was invented. The price of the hard drives was decreased, whereas the capacity or storage of the hard drives was increased. And it kept increasing from that time to date. There are a few surprising things about the hard drives which you might not be aware of. Like at present, the hard drives are very small in comparison with the hard drives of the older time. You should know that when the hard drives were invented, they took a complete room, as they were very big. But these days we have hard drives that can be stored in the pockets also. You can easily carry them in your bags and can travel from one place to another. So, this was also one of the big changes that have been brought in the hard drives after the invention.

Not just this but the changes in the storage size have also been brought in terms of measuring the data. Like earlier, people used to measure data in the form of megabytes. Megabytes was said to be a big or unimaginable amount of data to be stored in the hard drives. The hard drives have a storage memory of around 5MB or 10MB at that time. But at present, we do have hard drives that can store the data in Gigabytes (GB) and Terabytes (TB). And you must be knowing that Gigabytes is bigger than the Megabytes. As 1 Gigabyte has around 1024 megabytes. So, you can imagine the evolution in terms of the storage capacity yourself only.

Commercial Hard Drives

It was IBM only, who invented the first commercial hard drive. It was sold in the year 1956 by IBM. The first commercial hard disk drive was named as Random Access Method of Accounting and Control – RAMAC. RAMAC was quite big and it also required a complete room for operating it. It was around the size of the two refrigerators. Its weight was around a ton. The hard drive was a RAMAC 305 system as its storage system was known as IBM 350. The storage memory of RAMAC was made till 5 MB only which means 5 megabytes only. And the costing of one megabyte at that time was $10,000. So, you can imagine how costly the hard drives were at that time.

Then, in the year 1961, another disk storage unit was brought which was known as the IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit. Some technological changes were brought in this disk storage unit. In the year 1963, IBM created the first removable hard disk drive. It was known as IBM 1311 and its storage memory was only 2.6 megabytes. In the year 1964, the first standardized hard disk drive was made by IBM. This hard disk drive was made to be used in a different version of the Computer System. It was known as IBM 2311.

Soon after these hard disk drives were released, more new hard drives came into existence with some changes in them. Like in the year 1970, a hard drive with error correction was made. Some other companies other than IBM also came into the hard drive business like Memorex, Western Digital, Seagate, and a few other companies. However, at present only 3 main manufacturers of Hard Disk Drives are there, they are Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. These companies are selling and shipping hard drives of the storage capacity of around 4 TB and less than that.

In the year 1980, first-gigabyte storage capacity hard disk drive was introduced by IBM, known as 3380. It had a storage capacity of 2.5 GB and it weighed only around 500 pounds. Its cost was around $40,000. The change in the number of platters used in the hard drives kept changing with time to make it more advanced. From the time the Integra Peripherals were introduced, the hard drives became quite smaller in size, unlike the old ones which were huge to be fit in a complete room. New technologies like magneto Resistive, smaller disk platter, etc. came into use in the 1990s. The first terabyte capacity and the first 500 GB capacity hard drive was introduced by Hitachi in the year 2007 and 2005 simultaneously.

You all must be well aware of the size and the capacity of the hard drives which we have at present. So, you can see how hard drives have evolved since their invention. Something very huge at that time is now quite smaller. But the capacity of it has increased tremendously.