The RAMAC ("Random Access Method of Accounting and Control") was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. An air compressor was required to protect its heads, its plates were as large as pizzas and its storage capacity (5Mb!!) is now small enough to fit in your pocket. The RAMAC was available for long-term loan at a modest sum of USD $35,000, equivalent to USD $254,275 today.
Twenty-five years later, the first hard drive for PC was invented. Thanks to the MFM encoding method, the PC could hold 4Mb of data and attained a transfer speed of 625Kb/s. A later version of the interface ST506 introduced the RLL coding method which allowed an even larger storage capacity and faster processing speed.
IBM once again rewrites history on the 12 August 1981, with the launch of the first personal computer – "Personal Computer (PC), IBM 5150." At a cost of USD $1,565, IBM 5150 offered just 16Kb of memory, the size of a small email. We had a hard time reminding ourselves that even at the end of the 80s, 100Mb was considered a very large drive space. Today, this size would barely be enough to install the operating system and of course, completely inadequate to run any applications.
"It’s hard to imagine the usefulness of the first computers, because compared to today’s standard, they can’t do much at all,"The editor-in-chief of the magazine The Economist regarding the limitations of the first PCs
Thanks to the different evolution's, the production of hard drives have increased from a few thousands in the 50s to over 260 million in 2003. The cost of saving on magnetic support grew from USD $2,057 per megabyte in the 60s to USD $0.033 per gigabyte today .
Over the years, we have become used to a certain degree of technology, and it is difficult to live without it. However, it took time for technology to reach its current level. For example, you may know that Apple had launched its first Mac computer in 1984, but did you know what inventions were launched that same year, that allow us to have tablets and smartphones today?
Did you know that the first licence on RAID configurations was made in 1978, which is 10 years before the release of the very influential article “A case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks” (that gave the acronym RAID), or that the first commercial data recovery had been accomplished by Ontrack in 1987?
According to Bill Healy, the director of Hitachi, drives that contain terabytes will be small enough to be worn like jewelry. “We will soon have everything on us - our albums and songs, photos, and administrative documents.”
Having six different drives is common practice nowadays: PCs, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles, and smart TVs, just to name a few. Some experts predict that there will be households that have over 25 drives, with the advent of the Internet of Things.
It is even predicted that there will be as many drives supplied in the next five years as there were in the past 50 years. Analysts like Gartner, IDC, and TrendFocus believe in a massive growth in number of units and in sales revenues.
Ontrack offers the most innovative expertise and technology to recover lost data from any type of media, operating system, or storage device, regardless of how old or damaged it is.
A piece of advice to remember is to always anticipate and prepare for the worst. By establishing a relationship with a data recovery service provider early on, you are arranging a contingency plan for the worst case scenario.