The hard drive turns 50

Gary Reyes / Mercury News archives Jacob Bell, left, worked on the first RAMAC hard drive at IBM. His son Howard Bell, center, helped oversee construction of IBM's Almaden Research Center. His son Sonny, right, joined Big Blue in 1976. More photosOn Sept. 13, 1956, an IBM lab at 99 Notre Dame Road in San Jose began shipping a product that changed history. It is Silicon Valley's unsung hero, though it taught us bits and the mega, giga, tera, peta and exa bytes. Dubbed RAMAC, or Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, it was the original hard drive, a funny-looking giant machine with 50 spinning, 24-inch-wide disks covered with red paint. It cost about $50,000 a year to lease in 1956 dollars -- equivalent to nearly $350,000 today -- and had 5 megabytes of information, about enough space to store one song on an iPod. On its 50th anniversary, the hard drive is taking an ever-more-central role in the digital lifestyle, storing movies, photos, e-mail and the other sundry details of modern existence. Industry experts say more hard drives will be shipped over next five years than in the previous 50. But in the long term, as the industry continues to increase the capacity of hard drives 40 percent every year, will the world even need all that space? ``I think the digital revolution is just starting,'' said Bill Healy, Hitachi's senior vice president of corporate strategy and marketing. ``It's hard to think of how the digital lifestyle is going to change.'' The impact of the hard drive's creation can hardly be overstated. The original RAMAC (pronounced RAM-ak) came with heads that, in a few seconds, could read the information on storage disks. Before its arrival, people had to assess information by searching through tape reels for several minutes or hours. The efficient hard drive created an industry, launching as many as 260 companies over time that made hard drives or their components. Paving the way It also paved the way for others: Today, hard drives store data in iPods, TiVos, servers and cars. Amazon.com, Google, eBay and even Web-based e-mail could not exist without the invention of the hard drive. ``Most people miss the fact that they are using hard drives,'' said Mark Kryder, chief technology officer at Seagate. ``They take them for granted.'' Today Hitachi offers a hard drive that holds 500 gigabytes of data, and each gigabyte of storage can cost less than 50 cents. Despite the technology's growth, profitability hasn't always grown with capacity, and hard-drive companies have ridden the ups and downs of the computer industry. However, in recent years, consumers' demand for hard drives and the growth of the Internet have given the industry a real boost. In the past four to five years, the industry has shipped 2 billion drives, about the same number it shipped in the previous 50 years, according to Healy of Hitachi, which bought IBM's hard-drive business in 2002. Getting smaller In 1999, IBM introduced the one-inch microdrive, specifically designed for consumer applications. In 2004, Apple Computer put the drives in its iPod mini -- but when Apple released the iPod nano in 2005, it came with flash memory -- a smaller, faster but more expensive storage medium. Some phones and video cameras rely on micro drives, but flash continues to nip at the hard-drive industry's heels. ``Flash memory has become cost-effective for mobile users, who use the shirt pocket computer,'' said Jim Porter, who ran the research firm Disk/Trend and who worked for one of the first companies to receive the RAMAC in 1956. Still, demand for external hard drives continues to grow as many consumers long to take information with them. Others are choosing to store more data on a company's remote servers instead, as companies such as Yahoo, YouTube and MySpace launch services that behave like giant C drives in the sky. ``Storage is moving away from us,'' said Jim Till, chief marketing officer at Xythos, a San Francisco software company whose software helps institutions manage and share their stored files. But as people store more data on Internet servers, they are likely to also need more hard drives at home as well. ``It's very good for the industry,'' Healy said. ``It's all part of the conversion to the digital lifestyle.'' In five to 10 years, the average household will have 10 to 20 hard drives, according to a hopeful estimate from the International Disk Drive, Equipment and Materials Association. But is there a danger the industry could top out? Is there a point, not too far out in the future, where a single hard drive will store everything cheaply? Ultimate hard drive Perhaps. A future benchmark, maybe 50 years off: For about $200, consumers will be able to buy a single drive that will store everything they have watched or heard in their lives, said Richard Doherty at Envisioneering Group, a market research firm in Seaford, N.Y. But even that won't be the death of the hard-drive industry. ``We can all reduce our appetite for data and music, but I don't think that's going to happen,'' Doherty said. ``It's amazing that our appetite is growing as fast as the hard drive.''