IBM is celebrating the 55th anniversary of the first hard drive. At the time, this was a breakthrough that would change the path of technology.
However, to put into perspective how far we have all come:
The hard drive IBM shipped in 1956:
* Stored 5 megabytes (MB)
* Cost $11,000 per megabyte
* Was 60 inches long x 68 inches high x 29 inches deep
* Weighed about 1 ton
In today’s dollars that would mean:
A $179 16 GB iPod Nano:
* Stores 3,200 times more data
* Would cost: $1,429,176,320
* Requires 8 semi-truck shipping containers to hold the data
A petabyte of storage would:
* Cost: $93,662,499,307,520
* Require a building the size of 10,814 football fields to hold the drives
* Require 472 of the world’s largest data centers to hold the drives
Compare that to being able to get a petabyte of storage for $117,000 and store it in a single rack. Of course, IBM researchers from the 50’s are clearly some of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
Note: $1 in 1956 is $7.93 in 2010 adjusted for inflation.