Source: 10 Colossal Old Computers That Changed History
Of course, my attention was drawn to number 9: IBM 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) – 1956. (Al Shugart helped engineer the RAMAC, the first disk drive ever — and went on to found Seagate in 1979, making the first disk drive for personal computing.)
According to Will of The Best Computer Science Schools blog, “The system’s magnetic disk memory unit was made up of 50 disks with 50,000 sectors, and the disks could spin at 1,200 revolutions per minute. Businesses were now able to store and access information on demand. Thanks to the 305 RAMAC, data processing had been revolutionized forever.” You can say that again!
I wonder if resurrecting the past makes sense. Could the cloud companies use a 50 platter 50 Terabyte hard drive today? You bet they could, and they probably would in applications like cold storage where capacity trumps performance unless you need something off of one of the platters…stat. Then again, power could be the gating factor here.
If each sector is 512 bytes, then each platter holds 25MB and so the 50 platter disk drive holds 1,250MB?
Or is it MiB?