Brave New Hard Drives

File that, would you? There was a time when your only choice was to stuff a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere (and hope that later, you'd remember where).

Today, we take digital storage for granted but the fact is, the possibilities for storing all sorts of files – words, numbers, images, music, video, and more – have been growing by leaps and bounds for the past fifty years, as computers themselves shrunk from forests of machines filling huge rooms to thin pieces of plastic apt to slide off the laps of careless users.

When PCs first came out, there were no affordable hard drives. Even when the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, it had only a 160 kilobyte floppy drive. The first mass market PC with a built-in hard drive was the IBM XT, which came out in 1983, with a whopping 10 megabytes of storage.

The original 160 KB floppy could store about 164,000 bytes or characters – enough for about 137 pages of double spaced text. Forget about graphics, music or video. That 10 megabyte drive back in 1983 could store about 8,800 pages of text.

And Seagate makes a PC hard drive that stores 750 GB.

While it took until the 1980s for hard drives to migrate down to PCs, they were actually invented back in the 1950s. The first hard drive used in a commercial computer was unveiled by IBM 50 years ago this week on September 13, 1956.

That first drive assembly, called the "IBM 350 disc storage unit" was part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, according to Craig Butler, IBM's manager of disc storage products.

The device, according to Butler, made it possible for businesses to access data on a random basis without having to predefine the order of access - similar to the way you would locate a song on a cassette tape.

The storage process was called "continuous accounting" because it allowed users – that is, businesses who could afford it - to process data right after it was loaded into the computer.

The device, which stored five million characters (a bit short of 5 megabytes), cost $35,000 in 1956 dollars and stood 5 feet tall, a little less than 6 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.

Storage capacity for drives is measured in areal density – the number of bits per square inch of storage surface. The areal density of today's drives, according to Butler, is 64 million times higher than it was back in 1956: an increase of 46 percent per year. Butler expects drive capacity to continue to grow rapidly for the next couple of years but eventually slow down.

Still, consumers can expect to see significant improvements in capacity over the next few years. A relatively new breakthrough is technology that increases areal density by aligning bits of data vertically or perpendicularly, instead of horizontally.

Prior to this innovation, bits were stored on flat sections of the platter. Storing them vertically is a little like erecting a high-rise building, enabling engineers to pack more per inch into the total amount of disc real estate.

In March 2005, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies demonstrated an areal density of 230 gigabits per square inch by using perpendicular recording technology, which the company says is "the highest areal density achieved to date based on vertical recording."

Seagate has recently switched over to perpendicular technology for its current generation of products. The process, according Seagate spokesperson Brian Ziel "allowed use to get from 500 GB to 750 GB in about six months."

"It took the drive industry 50 years to get from 5 megabytes to 500 GB," he added. Ziel predicts that perpendicular technology will "allow us to increase capacity about 40 percent per year for the next five or six years."

In addition to low cost drives for PCs, cheaper and larger hard drives are also making it cheaper to add backup systems to PCs. A few years ago, you pretty much had to use a slow tape backup system to backup an entire PC hard drive but now you can get 300 or 500 even 750 gigabyte drives to connect to a PC or Mac via the USB port.

Seagate's 750GB Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drive (about $430) is bigger than the hard drives installed even in most high-end PCs. I recently tested Maxtor's 300 GB external drive ($300) and Western Digital's new 500 GB MyBook external drive ($300) and found both easy to install and fast for transferring files when connected to a USB 2.0 port.

The other benefit to the evolution of disk drives is that the cost of storage is also dropping by about 50 percent a year, which not only makes it affordable for consumers and businesses to buy higher capacity drives but also for Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, MySpace and YouTube to offer an ever increasing amount of free storage to users.

Google's generous two gigabytes of free email wouldn't be possible if weren't for higher capacity hard drives. Likewise for video services, like YouTube, which encourage people to store videos for others to download.

One image that probably doesn't come to mind for aficionados of the digital lifestyle is the white-shirted, pocket-protected, slide rule-carrying engineer of the Eisenhower years.

Even so, a thank you to those IBM engineers of the 1950s is not out of line. Think of them the next time you log onto the Internet, sink into the couch to watch a TV show on TiVo, or head for the beach – with a hard drive-equipped iPod.