The hard drive turns 50

Hard drives are a little smaller these days

The hard drive celebrated its birthday on Wednesday, reaching the grand old age of 50.

IBM introduced the first magnetic hard drive in 1956 with the introduction of the IBM 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (Ramac). 

The device signalled the end of punch cards and magnetic drums as the primary storage mediums.

IBM's Ramac offered 5MB of storage on a total of 50 disks measuring 24in in diameter.

The disks were stacked on a cylinder and a reader head moved from one disk to the other to retrieve information. It was considered too expensive to have 50 reader heads.

Ramac was housed in an enclosure about the size of two fridges, and weighed several tons.

Disk storage capacities have since increased by a factor of 70,000, while the disks have shrunk to sizes as small as 1in.

Back in 1956 IBM only leased its computer equipment, as the Ramac had a price tag of about $50,000. Adjusted for inflation, it would cost about $360,000 today.

• Photos of the Ramac are available on the Silicon Valley Sleuth blog

The disk drive was initially used for enterprise storage only. Not until the invention of the first micro-drive in 1999 did researchers create a disk drive specifically designed for consumer applications.

Micro-drives currently power devices such as digital video cameras and iPod music players.

Only a few Ramac devices are known to exist today. Volunteers at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California are restoring one in an attempt to turn it into a fully working device.

It is intended to be displayed at a new museum that will be situated near the Silicon Valley site where the Ramac was first developed.

Flash memory, meanwhile, has started to chip away at the hard drive's market, but few people expect it to supplant the storage technology any time soon.

The digital media boom is actually increasing the demand for disk-based storage, including the movie download service that Apple launched earlier this week.

• Photos of the Ramac are available on the Silicon Valley Sleuth blog