Tutorial I - Storage Drives and a Brief History of the Computer

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Storage Drives and a Brief History of the Computer!

Welcome back to my Blog!  

Today we are going to discuss hard drives with a brief history of the computer.

It’s hard to imagine that with today’s versatile laptops that can process email,  music, internet, and multiple other functions, that these tiny ‘computers’ used to take up entire warehouses with a much more limited role of functionality.  One of the first all-electronic computers, ENIAC, was built at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943 to help support the war effort.  ENIAC literally took up multiple floors with multiple personnel to work the machine.  For memory storage, it used an IBM card reader for input and card punch for output.

www.computersciencelab.com/computerhistorypt3.htm

Apple 2 History.org

As time moved forward computers began to shrink in size, while gaining processing speed.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have been credited with contributing significantly to the personal computer revolution with the creation of the Apple I.  The machine would fit on a desk top and sold for under $600, giving access to the everyday user.  For memory storage, Apple used ordinary cassette tapes, which were eventually superseded by the introduction of the 5 ¼ in floppy disk drive.

www.apple2history.org

In 1980, Seagate Technology introduced the first hard disk drive for microcomputers, the ST506.  This first hard disk drive was comprised of numerous moving parts.  The platters, where the information is actually stored were spun at up to 3,600 RPM.  The second moving parts were the Read / Write heads that scan back and forth over the platters moving information back and forth. 

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This new Hard Disk drive technology worked extremely well and was welcomed into the marketplace.  As sales grew, so did the storage capacity and speed.  In 1997 Seagate introduced the first 7,200 RPM, Ultra ATA HDD, which progressed to the first 15,000 RPM HDD in 2005.  Storage followed suit, going from 5 megabytes in 1980 to currently over 1 Terabyte of information, which translates to over 1 million megabytes of capacity.

www.duxcw.com/digest/guides/hd/index.html

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As popular as Hard Disk Drives have been, they do have their limitations, and these are primarily due to the physical movement of the units.  Motors can go out, excessive heat can damage the rotating platters, platters can get scratched due to excessive vibration, Read / Write heads can fail, along with numerous other examples.  With all of these examples of potential damage to the units, causing data loss, it would make sense to eventually replace the moving Hard Disk Drive with a non movement Solid State Drive.

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SSD technology has actually been around since the 1950’s, but was either not quite as fast or inexpensive as the comparable HDD.  In 1995, M-Systems introduced a line of SSD based on flash-based memory storage.  They were almost as fast as the HDD, did not require battery backup for memory, and were extremely resistant to shock, vibration, and heat. 

You can see just a few of the many advantages of the SSD over the HDD:

• Spin up time is instantaneous
• Random Access time is about .1ms versus HDD’s 5-10 ms
• Read Latency is low due to the lack of mechanical components
• Consistent read performance does not change, because again no moving parts
• No need for Defragmentation
• Acoustic Levels in decibles are low, again no moving parts
• Power consumption is reduced by almost ½ versus HDD.

As computers and in particular storage developed over the years physical form shrank, prices shrank, and capacity and speed increased exponentially.  SSDs are just one of the newest iterations of the technological advance in the computing environment.

Images Apple 2 History.org and Robert Candler