Subscribe by EmailTechnology Motivator: One Gigabyte
August 27, 2009 by Geeks are Sexy | 11 comments
On the left, a one gigabyte IBM hard drive dating back from 1987. On the right, a one gigabyte SD card from the current era. Storage devices have certainly shrunk in size in the last 20 years haven’t they?
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Should have shown a MicroSD card.
Or even 1,000 of those huge drives and a single terabyte drive ;-)
That would have been awesome ;)
We would need quite a lot of floor space to take a picture like this, though!
I guess size DOES matter…
Hard drive speed, however, didn’t change so much.
I remember when i worked for a software company and we upgraded our total storage to 1GB. I thought we’d never use all that space.
And I can remember when a platter the same size as the one on the left held 5MB.
Well, I don’t go that far, but I remember having a 10 or 20 MB hard drive, and it was about twice the size of a conventional 3.5″ drive…. that was about… 20-22 years ago…
I wonder if we’re gonna have 100TB SDs in twenty years, what do you think?
I remember them coming out. .
The drive unit on is an IBM 3380, which first shipped in the early ’80s and was about 2.5Gb when first shipped. Note it has two head assemblies on the same set of platters. There’s a better picture at
http://www.tietokonemuseo.saunalahti.fi/eng/ibm_3380_eng.htm
and IBM has pictures showing how much datacenter space those units took up (2 per cabinet), plus the history of it, at
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html
in which you see that unit, in September 1987, had just shy of 4GB (though there was a “cheap model” available with reduced storage, around 1.25 GB)
Could have used a Micro-SD card for 4x the effect.
In the 60’s I worked for a computer company in the UK. I worked on “conventional” computers – 12′ x 6′ cabinets, many thousands of transistors, 48KW core RAM, and large 9 track tape drives. In the next bay over was an experimental “solid state” version, a cube about 18″ on a side. The standing joke was that some day the computer would fit inside the plug we used to connect it to the tape drives. So, half right – we didn’t consider that the storage technology would also shrink.
I am playing around with a powerful Linux system at home these days. 600 MHz ARM, 256MB RAM, 256MB Flash, Bluetooth, 802.11g, micro-SD card slot, camera interface, touch-screen LCD interface, USB master hub, USB slave/master “on the go” hub, USB serial port (boot console). It is the size of a stick of gum. I kid you not.
I don’t even want to discuss how old this makes me feel!!!
I was in an IBM shop at Mattel Toys that had a wall of IBM 3330s and an IBM 370/155 mainframe