All You Need to Know About The First Hard Disk Drive

It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the size of 1TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second.

Fast forward 10 years, and in 2019 the largest commercially available HDDs can store at least 15TB of data. The world of SSDs offers even more space of at least 100TB.

The first hard disk drive, like so many innovations in computing, came from IBM. It was called the IBM Model 350 Disk File and was a huge device.

It had 50 24-inch disks contained inside a cabinet that was as large as a cupboard and anything but lightweight. This hulk of a storage unit could store a whopping 5MB of data.

Case in point, here below is a 250MB hard disk drive from 1979.

IBM introduced the first hard disk drive to break the 1GB barrier in 1980. It was called the IBM 3380 and could store 2.52GB (“2.52 billion characters of information,” according to IBM).

Its cabinet was about the size of a refrigerator and the whole thing weighed in at 550 pounds (250 kg). It gave users rapid access to a large amount of data, thanks to transferring information at three million characters per second.

Considering we now have tiny, cheap USB sticks that can easily hold 256GB of data (and expensive ones—1TB or more), which is about 6,500 times more than a normal hard disk drive in 1990 (40MB), we can say that things have certainly moved forward.

And just like we are now looking back and shaking our heads at the amazing difference between now and a few decades ago, we may look back at 2019 and shake our heads with similar amazement.