09 December 2010
The hard disk drives of today are compact enough to be handy, sturdy enough for any environment (be it home, office or mobile) and of a capacity to store data which is just short of unbelievable. In contrast, the earlier hard disk drives were gigantic in size, too sensitive to be used anywhere other than an especially protected data center and, by modern standards, generally had tiny memory capacity.
The first hard disk drives were the size of washing machines and had large motors which necessitated the use of high current or a three-phase power supply. Nowadays hard disk drives of desktops, now have 500 to 1,000 gigabytes of loading capacity, with some well into the terabytes.
Few products in the history of human invention have shown such amazing reductions in cost and size accompanied by an increase in sophistication and performance as hard disk drives.
Few products in the history of human invention have shown such amazing increase in sophistication and performance as hard disk drives.
50 years ago
In 1956, the first hard disk drive was introduced by IBM. It had fifty pieces of 24-inch platters which were accessed by a single head assembly, making the access time very low at 1 second.
This was improved slightly in 1961 with the development of a hard disk drive whose data surfaces were accessed faster with the use of flying head or multiple heads with self-acting air bearings.
40 years ago
The first hard disk drive of low mass and low load heads used lubricated media and was introduced in 1973. This technology is now being employed by virtually all hard disk drives.
20 years ago
The 1980’s was the real beginning of an era of personal computers and internal hard disk drives became the trend. External hard drives remained popular, however, as some computers did not have easily accessible hard drive bays.
The Present
Since its inception, the world has not looked back but has gone on to do nothing less than amazing exploits in the improvement of hard disk drives. Companies are now outwitting each other in coming up with hard disk drives of ever larger loading capacities.
The timeline of the evolution of hard disk drives is dotted with such closely-spaced feats of progression. In 2002, for instance, 137-GB hard disk drives were first marketed. Just three years later, a 500-GB drive came out and in less than a year after, the loading capacity jumped right up to 750 GB.
In 2007, the first 1-terabyte hard drive was released and last year, a 3-TB arrived.
The Future
Revolution, not evolution, may be the better term to describe the advance of hard disk drives, and who knows what size hard disks will be in years to come.
And to think, on most days in our former lives as PC salespeople, someone would often scoff something along the lines of “a 20gb hard drive?! I’ll never fill that in a million years, what a waste of money…”
If you are experiencing problems with your computer or laptop's hard drive, speak to the data recovery experts at Kingdom Data Recovery as soon as possible for a free consultation. The sooner your hard drive is examined by a professional, the greater the chances of successfully recovering data from it are.
