A new 8TB hard drive would have cost $77 billion in 1960.
All computers, large and small, have a hard drive , and you will notice that most of them are hardware that stores software, music, videos, and operating systems .
Aside from that, here are a few things I did n't know about ubiquitous computing equipment :
Photo from Wikipedia
- The first hard drive, the 350 Disk Storage Unit, was sold nowhere and was part of IBM's complete computer system. It was released in September 1956. Yes, 1956 !
- IBM started shipping these amazing new devices to other companies in 1958, but they probably didn't mail it. The world's first hard drive was the size of an industrial refrigerator and weighed a ton north.
- But given the fact that 1961 these hard drives were borrowing more than $1,000 a month, the buyer's favourite is probably the last. If that seemed outrageous, you could have bought a little over $34,000 dollars.
- The average hard drive available today, such as the 8TB Seagate model that sold over $ 200 USD in the Amazon than the first IBM drive 300 million times or more affordable then.
- If you want a lot of storage space to its customers in 1960, slightly more than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom US $ 77.2 billion of the money I heard a thing!
- IBM's expensive hard drive monster had a total capacity of less than 4 MB. It was the size of a single music track of average quality, like what you would get from iTunes or Amazon .
- Today's hard drives can store more than that. At the end of 2015, Samsung recorded its largest hard drive, the 16TB PM1633a SSD, but 8TB drives are much more common.
- So, in 60 years after IBM's 3.75MB hard drive was the best, it's got over 2 million storage on an 8TB drive . As we have seen, the cost is very low.
- Bigger hard drives won't be able to store more than we could, and they simply enable new industries that could not exist without advances in storage technology.
- Inexpensive but high-capacity hard drives allow companies like Backblaze to offer services to back up data to servers rather than their own backup disks. At the end of 2015 it had 50,228 hard drives.
- According to a 2013 report, Netflix required 3.14 PB (about 3.3 million GB) of hard drive space to store all its movies.
- Do you think Netflix is in great demand? Facebook was storing close to 300 PB of data on its hard drive in mid-2014. Undoubtedly, that number is much greater today.
- Not only has the storage capacity increased, but the size has also decreased at the same time. One MB today takes up 1.1 billion times less physical space than a MB in the late 50s .
- Putting it another way, a 256GB smartphone in your pocket is like a swimming pool of 54 Olympic sizes completely filled with hard drives from 1958 .
- In many ways, older IBM hard drives are no different from modern hard drives. Both have a rotating p ratter and a head attached to an arm that reads and writes data .
- Spinning platters are pretty fast, spinning at 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute depending on your hard drive.
- Every moving part generates heat and eventually starts to fail. Often makes loud noises . The soft noise your computer makes is probably the fan circulating the air, but the other irregularities are often the time of the hard drive.
- Eventually moving things wear out. We know it. For that reason and other reasons, solid state drives with no moving parts (basically giant flash drives ) are slowly replacing traditional hard drives.
- Unfortunately, traditional hard drives or SSD hard drives don't keep shrinking forever. Storing pieces of data in too small a space and thoroughly examining the physics of how hard drives work. (Seriously - it's called superlight.)
- That means you will need to store your data in a different way in the future. Many science fiction technologies are currently under development, such as 3D storage , holographic storage , DNA storage, etc.
- Data , Star Trek's android character, talks about science fiction, that in one episode his brain has 88 PB. Much less than Facebook. I don't know exactly how to take it.