I recently came across a very interesting page in which John C. McCallum has collected a huge number of hard disk unit specs along with introduction year and price.
Beginning from 1956, with the 24″ IBM sporting a hefty 3.75 MBytes (!) the list goes through time and megabytes up to a 2016-compliant 8TB unit.
I’ve been writing in the past about how much storage has changed in the (recent) past, but is really overwhelming!
As an added feature, here comes a single hard disk platter from 1974 I’ve been recently given: as far as I’ve been able to investigate, it should be some 200 KBytes-per-side unit and the whole hard disk unit featured five of them – up to 2 Megabytes (!).
Measures 36 cm (diameter) and weighs in at 3 Kg… (around 1,18 ft and 6 pounds): you can look at the dwarfed Nokia E61 (which incidentally uses a 256 MB MicroSD)!
This a not-so-tiny floptical disk I recently spotted at a vintage computer event (thanks to friend Ezio Bagnis):
You can find the Hard disk original price table here.
