A Brief History of the Hard Disk Drive
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by: Alex Kantaris.
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Word Count: 517
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 Time: 3:06 AM
During this period Hard Drive capacities were commonly measured in Bytes and Kilobytes, with Hard Drives boasting a capacity of a Megabyte or more considered something of a rarity at the time (the first Gigabyte Hard Drive would not be produced until 1980 and even then due to its size and hefty price tag it was not a feasible option for the everyday consumer). Throughout the 60s and 70s it was not unusual for a Hard Drive to be similar in scale to a household fridge, however by the `PC-Era` of the 1980s the standard size for a Hard Drive became significantly smaller at only 5 1/4 Inches.
As the 90s dawned upon the computing world giant technological leaps forward were made in all areas of Computing. It was at this point that Hard Drives along with many other Computer components began to resemble their modern-day counterparts. During the late 80s and early 90s it was no longer uncommon for a computer to be sold with a Hard Drive featuring a capacity which could be measured in Megabytes.
Hard Drives also continued to grow progressively smaller in physical size with the worlds first 2.5 Inch Hard Drive being released in 1991 and the worlds first 1.3 Inch Hard Drive released a year later in 1992. Despite smaller sizes being readily available to manufacturers, it was the 3.5 Inch format which quickly became the standard Hard Drive size adopted for integration into desktop computers all over the world. At the same time the 2.5 Inch Hard Drive format became the favoured standard for integration into all variety of laptops, notebooks and similar scaled down devices.
Today 3.5 Inch Hard Drives are still used in the vast majority of desktop Computers and although this remains unchanged the storage capacity of the modern-day Hard Drive is over 300,000 times larger than that of its earlier 10MB incarnations at a monstrous 3 Terabytes. The most problematic hurdle in the race to develop a Terabyte Hard Drive was overcome in 2002 when the addressing space barrier which had long prevented the development of a Hard Drive any larger than 137GB was broken. Five years later in 2007 the worlds first Terabyte Hard Drive was shipped out by Hitachi GST.
Over the course of the following three years Hard Drives with capacities of 1.5 TB, 2.0 TB and 3.0 TB were released by competing manufacturers Seagate (formerly Maxtor) and Western Digital. With over 300 times the capacity of its nearest 2011 rival, the visionary Petabyte Hard Drive would fulfill the needs of a space hungry generation of computer users, however it may be a few years yet until the first Petabyte Hard Drive reaches the shelves of our Computer retailers.
About the Author
Alex Kantaris is the author of this article on Cheap Hard Drive. Find more information on Seagate Hard Disk here.
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