The Development of The Hard Drive Over the Past 50 Year

The hard drives of today are compact enough to be portable, sturdy enough for any environment (be it home, office or mobile) and of a capacity to store info which is just shy of improbable. In contrast, the earlier disc drives were large in size, too sensitive to be used anywhere other than an especially protected data center and, by modern standards, often had little memory capacity.

The first hard disk drives were the dimensions of fridges and had giant motors which needed the employment of high current or a three-phase power supply. Today 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 extraordinary reductions in cost and size accompanied by a rise in sophistication and performance as hard disk drives.

50 years back

In 1956, the 1st hard disk drive was introduced by IBM. It had 50 pieces of 24-inch platters which were accessed by a single head assembly, making the access time terribly low at 1 second.

This was improved slightly in 1961 with the development of a disk drive whose information surfaces were accessed faster with the use of flying head or multiple heads with self-acting air bearings.

40 years ago

The first hard drive of low mass and low load heads used lubricated media and was introduced in 1973. This technology is now being employed by nearly all hard disk drives.

20 years ago

The 1980's was the real beginning of an era of computers and internal hard drive drives became the trend. External disk drives stayed popular nevertheless, as some computers didn't 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 superb exploits in the improvement of disk drives. Firms are now outwitting one another in coming up with disc drives of ever bigger loading capacities.

The timeline of the development of disc drives is dotted with such closely-spaced undertakings of progression. In 2002, for example, 137-GB hard disk drives were first sold. Just three years after, 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 1st 1-terabyte hard drive was released and last year, a 3-TB arrived, this year 4TB has just been released.

The Future

Revolution, not evolution, could be the better term to explain the advance of hard drives, and who knows what size hard disks will be in years yet to come.

And to think, on most days we would regularly dismiss along the lines of "a 20gb hard drive? ! I will never fill that in 1,000,000 years, what a waste of money"

If you are needing a hard drive recovery talk to the data recovery pros as fast as possible for a free consultation. The sooner your drive is examined by a professional, the greater the prospects of successfully recovering data from it are.