From 20MB To 20TB: 40 Years Of HDD Technology
StorageNewsletter.com, December 7th, 2022
About 40 years ago, the first PCs were equipped with HDDs - large drives that had a storage capacity of just 20MB.
However, the technology shrank rapidly in terms of physical size, while storage capacities grew. The very smallest models have since disappeared from the market, but the demand for ever-increasing capacity continues unabated. Current HDDs can hold up to 20TB - a million times as much memory as those early PCs.
The history of the HDD goes back to the 1950s. Even the drives of that time share their base technology with today's models - rotating magnetic discs between which arms with R/W heads move and magnetize or scan bits. The first HDDs (IBM Ramac) were like small cabinets and weighed almost a ton. They were used in selected computer and mainframe systems and revolutionized data processing, because more immediate access to information was suddenly possible.