IBM: The World's First Hard Drive

Hard drives have grown in size and slimmed down in size over the years. When the first hard drives were being developed they were 3.75 Megabytes, that is the size of about one high quality 3 minute song. It was 68 cubic feet big, that is the just under the average minicompact car cubic footage. And weighed just about as much as the car, the hard drive weighing in at 2,000 pounds. To access data on it it would take about 600 milliseconds, that was fast for back then. They were amazed they could measure it in milliseconds and not seconds. The price per megabyte was about 9,000 dollars (Farrance, 2006).
In 1956 IBM shipped its first hard drive the Ramac 305 system, having 5 megabytes of data and selling for 10,000 dollars. It worked with 50 24-inch platters with being the size of 2 refrigerators. IBM invented heads that work off a cushion of air. In 1963 IBM makes the first removable hard drive with 14 inch platters and holding 2.6 Megabytes. In 1978 the idea of raid (redundant arrays of independent disks) it was then patented. (Farrance, 2006) Seagate then introduced the st-506 drive and interface, it was then used in most early microcomputer systems. The first gigabyte hard drive then comes about in 1980, costing 40,000 dollars. That is just about 40 dollars a megabyte. In 1982 Western Digital announces the …show more content…
In 1988 Prairie Tek released the first 2.5-inch hard drive this drive also has 2 platters and holding 20 megabytes. Also produced that year was the 1-inch high 3.5-inch hard drive, this also is the current size is still the common form factor of todays hard drive. 1992 seagate come out with the first shock sensing 2.5-inch hard drive, this technology would sense vibration or free fall which would then tell the computer and the software would unload the heads from the disk so they would not have a head crash (Farrance,