Megabytes to Terabytes: Storage celebrates 50 yrs

In the 1970s, a Chennai-based prestigious business house dealing in kitchen appliances and latex products, spent over a crore of rupees on computerisation. Today, the same company has modern equipment that technological innovation has gifted to mankind.

However, the chairman of the company, who was in his 20s during the computerization decades ago, has a 'painful’ story to narrate on technology. He is still using a large space of few hundred square feet in Chennai for storage. In the time of terabytes and pica bytes, you must be wondering why a company is using such a large space to store data. This space has been used to safely store data saved over the past few decades.

“I really don’t want to throw these tapes. I know it is worthless. Whenever I look at them, I remember the crore of rupees spent on them,” the chairman rues.

Storage has played a critical role since time immemorial. Starting from memorizing the Vedas to scribbling it down on palm leaves to writing them on paper to digitizing the information and storing it on memory drives, storage has had an exciting and eventful journey.

Storage is celebrating its 50th birthday this week. It all started with the research on direct processing solutions at the IBM Lab in San Jose, California, resulting in the shipment of the IBM System 305 and the first hard disk drive, the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) on September 13, 1956.

RAMAC used memory disks coated with magnetic iron oxide paint — similar to that used on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge — and held a total of 5 megabytes (MB) of data on fifty 24-inch platters mounted on a rotating spindle. In the initial years, IBM kept on introducing new disk storage units and some of them include IBM 1301 introduced in 1961. IBM 1311, which used to store two million characters, followed. In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 Winchester disk system, the first to use a sealed head/disk assembly (HDA).

For many years, hard disks were large in size, more suited to use in protected environments of a data center or a large office than in a small office or home. In the 1970s, most hard disks had 8-inch (20 cm) or 14-inch (35 cm) platters, required an equipment rack or a large amount of floor space. In many cases hard disks required high-amperage or even three-phase power hookups due to the large motors they used. Hence, hard disks were not commonly used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technologies introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard drive, with a capacity of 5 megabytes.

The industry has come a long way since its inception in 1956. According to a recent study by the University of California, e-mails generate about 400,000 terabytes of new information worldwide each year. The study also stated that the world’s population of 6.3 billion people generates almost 800MB of information per person annually. This amounts to 276 terabytes of storage each year, 92 per cent of which is stored on hard disk drives.

Industry analysts project that worldwide hard disk drive shipments will grow from 409 million units in 2006 to over 650 million by 2010, more than 12 per cent annually. The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. In the latter half of the 1990s, hard drives with capacities of one gigabyte and more became available. As of 2006, the smallest desktop hard disk, still in production, has a capacity of 40 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity internal drives are a 3/4 terabyte (750 gigabytes), with external drives at or exceeding one terabyte by using multiple internal disks.

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