Useless facts about your Hard Drive.

Useless facts about your Hard Drive.

March 12, 2007 10:56 am 0 comments

I love Hard Drive space. Currently I own 750 gig of space on my computer at home (I really need to RAID it sometime)

What I love the most about hard drives right now is the price. It is SO cheap to buy storage. Not like when I first started using computers, it was SO expensive!

So I present to you, some uselss facts about Hard Drives that only nerdy people would even care for.

Enjoy!

• The magnetic HDD is 50 years old. In 1956 IBM introduced 305 RAMAC, which is like the great-great-great grandfather of today’s disks. It was the size of a refrigerator, and stored a total of 4.4 megabytes (about 1 MP3). It had a purchase price of $10,000,000 per Gbyte.

• Today’s laptop drives are typically 2.5 inches and are a size of a deck of cards, and can store up to 160 gigabytes – or 131 billion bits per square inch. Price is less than $1 per gigabyte.

• Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT)

• In the U.S. alone, $600 million worth of external hard drives were sold in 2006, up 53% from 2005, The NPD Group, a market research firm, says. (NYT)

• External hard drive prices declined 28.4% from $197 in 2003 to $141 in 2006 and the amount of storage space on the drives doubled.(NYT)

• Per Gigabyte retail price of hard disk drive storage in 2003 was $2.04, but in 2006 it was 77 cents, according to The NPD Group.

• The recording density for data — aka capacity — has increased 60,000,000-fold in 50 years.

• The amount of worldwide information is projected to grow from 161 exabytes in 2006 to 988 exabytes in 2010. An Exabyte is a million terabytes.(WWD)

• By 2010, the total amount of data will overwhelm the total amount of digital storage by a factor of nearly 2 to 1. 2007 is the year that our ability to stuff bits into the digital universe will outstrip our ability to store them.(WWD)

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