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The world of technology is filled with fascinating insights. For devices and computer components, there are intriguing stories to explore. Besides learning about 6 ways to clean up your hard drive and boost your computer's storage, delve into the tales surrounding it. Do you know how much there is to discover about hard drives in these 21 facts?
1. The first hard drive, the 350 Disk Storage Unit, didn't just appear on shelves—it was an integral part of IBM's complete computer system, released in September 1956.
2. In 1958, IBM commenced shipping this groundbreaking device to other companies. The world's first hard drive at the time was equivalent in size to an industrial refrigerator and weighed over a ton.
Discover how much you really know about hard drives with these 21 facts!
3. In 1961, the first hard drive was available for rent at a staggering $1,000 per month. If you preferred, you could purchase that hard drive for around $34,000.
4. On average, a modern-day hard drive, like Seagate's 8TB model sold for over $200 on Amazon, is more than 300 million times cheaper than IBM's first hard drive.
5. Looking back to 1960, if users wanted more storage space, they'd have to pay a staggering $77.2 billion, slightly higher than the total GDP of the United Kingdom that year.
6. IBM's expensive and colossal hard drive had a total capacity of under 4 MB, equivalent to the size of an average-quality song you could download on iTunes or Amazon.
7. Modern hard drives can store a bit more. As of the end of 2015, Samsung held the record for the largest hard drive, the 16TB SSD PM1633a, but the 8TB drive is more commonly used. The market now offers a variety of SSDs, each with its own advantages. Consider your work and study needs carefully before choosing an SSD.
8. Just 60 years after IBM released the 3.75MB hard drive, you can now store data on an 8TB hard drive, over 2 million times the capacity, and at a lower cost.
21 things to know about hard drives
9. Larger hard drives not only allow users to store more data but also enable new industries that wouldn't exist without significant advancements in storage technology. When using a hard drive, be mindful of your data; accidentally deleting data on the hard drive may require time-consuming recovery or even professional data recovery services.
10. Despite being cost-effective, high-capacity hard drives allow companies like Backblaze to offer data backup services on their servers instead of relying on users' individual drives. In late 2015, they utilized 50,228 hard drives for this purpose.
11. According to a 2013 report, Netflix requires 3.14 PB (approximately 3.3 million GB) of hard drive capacity to store all their movies.
12. Ever wondered about Netflix's storage demands? In mid-2014, Facebook stored nearly 300 PB of data on hard drives. No doubt, this figure has significantly increased since then.
13. Not only has storage capacity increased, but the size of hard drives has also decreased significantly. 1MB now occupies about 11 billion times the physical space, less than 1MB at the end of the 1950s.
14. Another striking example is your 256 GB smartphone, equivalent to 54 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
15. Old IBM hard drives aren't much different from modern ones: both have platters and heads attached to an arm for reading and writing data.
16. These platter drives spin quite swiftly, usually at speeds of 5,400 or 7,200 revolutions per minute, depending on the hard drive.
17. All the moving parts generate heat, and eventual failures often come with quite a loud sound. The noise your computer produces is generally dominated by your hard drive.
18. For some reasons, solid-state drives (SSDs) lack moving parts (essentially a gigantic flash drive) and are gradually replacing traditional hard drives.
19. However, not all traditional hard drives, and neither SSDs, can continue to shrink indefinitely. Users can only store a portion of data in a very small physical space on hard drives.
20. All of these signify that users will have to store their data in various ways. Numerous futuristic technologies are being developed today, such as 3D storage, three-dimensional storage, DNA storage, and many more.
21. Speaking of science fiction, Data, the Android character in Star Trek, mentions in an episode that his brain holds 88 PB. That capacity is much less than Facebook's.
There are various types of hard drives on the market today, depending on our usage needs. We have different ways to choose a laptop hard drive, and there are many buying options that you can refer to from experienced individuals.
How much do you know about hard drives among the 21 things listed by Mytour above? After reading the article, do you think you have a good understanding of the stories surrounding hard drives? If you know any other interesting stories, feel free to share them in the comments below to share with Mytour.
