Storage Capacity of Hard Drives
The storage capacity of hard drives is not finite, and has been consistently increasing at an exponential rate since they were first introduced in the 1950s.
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History
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The first computer with a hard drive was the IBM 305 RAMAC. Released in 1956, the computer was bigger than a refrigerator and housed 50 24-inch platters that, when combined, could store 5 MB of data. The first hard drive for a personal computer came in 1980 and was designed by Seagate Technology. The drive was twice the size of current hard drives and also held 5 MB. That same year IBM announced its first 1 GB hard drive. It weight 550 pounds and cost $40,000.
Size
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Through the years hard drives have gotten smaller, faster and less expensive, thanks to technology such as high-speed computer cables, improved drive design, faster processors and other computer hardware. As of August 2010, the greatest amount of storage capacity in consumer-level hard drives was 2 TB (terabytes), which is more than 2,000 GB.
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Limitations
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The storage capacity of a hard drive, no matter how big or small, cannot be changed. It is impossible to "upgrade" a hard drive to include more storage capacity. Many times people will install multiple hard drives in a single system or mainframe. These setups, called RAID arrays, can be much larger, faster and more secure than the typical hard drive.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit hard drive image by Stanisa Martinovic from Fotolia.com
