IBM Builds on 50 Years of Spinning Disk Storage

SAN JOSE, Calif.—IBM, that oh-so-straight-laced bastion of research, development and commercial success, is kicking back a little to celebrate an anniversary this month and reflect upon how far technology has come since the days of refrigerator-sized computers, Elvis and "I Like Ike."

September 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the world's first commercial hard drive—the 305 RAMAC Computer, with its 350 Disk Storage Unit—that was designed and built right here in what would eventually become Silicon Valley. The Disk Storage Unit was introduced on Sept. 4, 1956, and the 305 RAMAC Computer was introduced on Sept. 13, 1956.

That first computing unit had a total memory storage capacity of a whopping 5MB on 50 24-inch platters.

"The digital photograph of Mona Lisa here in the slide show presentation is bigger than that!" joked IBM vice president of storage Barry Rudolph, who addressed a group of analysts and journalists at a half-day briefing at the company's Almaden Research Center, located in the foothills south of San Jose.

By comparison, the IBM System Storage DS8000 Turbo, introduced in August, can store up to 320 terabytes of information—the equivalent of all the images held in the Guggenheim, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more.

Another example of how things have changed: In 1956, the 350 Disk Storage Unit could hold the digital equivalent of the collected works of Shakespeare, while today's DS8000 could hold more than 76 million copies of Shakespeare's works.

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IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., used the occasion to look both backward and forward at the state of hard disk drives and storage technology.

"It's fun to go back and see how the first spinning disk was put together, a half-century ago," Rudolph said. "Here's a film proof that we've come a long way: The first magnetic slurry coating on the first disk drive was poured onto the spinning disk from a Dixie cup."

Everybody laughed as the scratchy black-and-white film showed exactly what he described: It looked like a chocolate shake being poured onto a slow-moving, rotating disk about the size of a personal pizza.

"This would leave a very uniform coating on the disk but also left a brown streak across the waist of the engineer's lab coats from the excess slurry," Rudolph said. "That's how they could tell which engineers were working on the 305."

That was then. Now some people are predicting that as soon as 12 to 18 months from now, we'll see 1TB desktops coming into the market.

IBM infuses new technology into storage

IBM certainly plans to be out front of the current explosion in storage capacity. What it intends to do—and, in fact, is now doing—is to integrate a measure of new technology from other parts of the company into the storage research projects now based at Almaden and its sister facilities in Haifa, Israel, and Geneva.

For example, IBM has been among those companies at the forefront of "autonomic," or self-healing, computing for several years. Autonomic computing is a form of artificial intelligence that allows a computing system to locate and identify programming and other system errors and make corrections without the help of a human administrator.

Some of the key projects going on at the Almaden location that are expected to produce commercial products soon include: