Gadgetory

a history of hard-disk drives I promise it's not a boring video what better way to kick things off than to mention the very first hard disk drive ever invented the IBM 305 so we thought about creating a new kind of electronic machine to keep business accounts up to date and make them available not monthly nor even daily but immediately such a machine would for the first time provide management with perpetually current business records the 305 used magnetism to embed data onto a platter or physical magnetized discs that held the information the cabinet that contained the drive measured approximately 150 by 170 by 75 centimeters or roughly the size of to stand-up refrigerators inside were 50 discs each measuring 61 centimeters in diameter that's fun at 1200 rpm for reference today's general hard drives typically rotate 7,200 times per minute or 120 times per second total storage of the 305 was 5 million characters equivalent to exactly 5 million bytes or using the decimal system 5 megabytes to put that into perspective that's about the size of a single high-resolution photograph perhaps the next noteworthy hard drive leaf was IBM's 33:30 also known as Merlin this storage facility contained disk packs with whopping 200 megabyte capacities and up to 1.2 gigabytes per facility numberland also introduced quote unquote error coding correction which among other things prevented the manifestation of disk errors as a result of physical imperfections on the platters these advancements pave the way for larger drive capacities and cheaper consumer grade units in 1980 IBM's 3380 became the first hard drive to ever reach the 1 gigabyte milestone the 3380 contained two 1.26 gigabyte drives that were sandwiched inside of a refrigerator sized container in the same year the world's first five and a quarter inch hard disk drive the size of a standard optical drive today was released and named the st dash 506 and given a price tag of 1500 US dollars which with inflation taken into consideration is roughly 4350 u.s. dollars today or 3,900 euros or 3,000 British pounds you could build an immaculate PC with that some of and I should also note that the STD 506 only contained a whopping five megabytes of internal storage it wasn't until 1997 that the first three-and-a-half inch hard drive emerged a unit IBM dubbed the Titan a single Death Star Titan drive had a capacity of sixteen point eight gigabytes and was the first drive to introduce GMR or giant magnetic resistance this discovery and thus implementation requires a bit of background knowledge on the hard drive functionality in general but I'll save that for another video now I'll go ahead give it a shot hard disk drives essentially using magnetic field to create domains where all magnetization is oriented in a particular direction the direction in which each domain is oriented for example North versus South is indicative of a logical level either 0 or 1 and if you're familiar at all with computer science 0 and 1 are the basis of binary code which nearly all information systems are reliant on today a series of ones and zeros can represent any given set of data and giant magnet resistance allows for specific magnetic sensors to more accurately detect the boundaries between two anti parallel domains yeah believe me I had to do quite a bit of homework on that one I've attached links in this video's description which detail the inner workings of hard drives and the theory behind GMR in much more detail so no worries there but let's get back to our timeline in 2003 SATA or serial advanced technology attachment is first introduced and would soon become the prominent data transfer interface ultimately replacing IDE or parallel ata the presence of which was made known by ribbon cables connecting motherboards to drives in older pcs in the same year IBM the computer giant of the 1900s sold its disk drive division to a company called Hitachi that you may be familiar with in 2005 Hitachi went on to produce the world's first 500 gigabyte hard drive dubbed the GST a lineup which would persist for quite some time the following year a company called Seagate you may have heard of one up Hitachi with the world's first 750 K hard drive and in this same year Toshiba released the world's first 200 gigabyte 2.5 inch hard disk drive and it's important to point out the two and a half inch drive is the most common form factor we see in laptops today this Toshiba Drive also took advantage of perpendicular recording which allowed specific magnetic arrangements to be packed in a much smaller spaces meaning that platters of similar densities could now pack more information into the same equivalent space ok here we go the hard drive storage space war is on in 2007 the first 1 terabyte hard drive was produced by Hitachi in 2009 a company by the name of Western Digital who also likely familiar invented the first two terabyte hard drive in 2011 Seagate invents the world's first four terabyte hard drive and in 2014 Seagate began selling the world's first eight terabyte hard drives which you can still purchase to this day and I'm quite certain that the storage war will only continue to intensify as time progresses was developed by IBM after a search that lasted five years a search that is not ended nor will it be so long as men need ever more powerful machines to extend the farthest reaches of the human mind let me know if you appreciate this first installment of the history series here on the channel by giving the video a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if you just hate everything about life be sure to check out the links in the video description to help explain in more detail what I was actually talking about in the video click the subscribe but if you haven't already and suggest future video topics in the comments as well this is science studio thanks for learning with this