The development of hard drive technology has been no less than amazing. The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first hard drive introduced by IBM in the mid 1950s and used to process accounting information. Although it occupied almost half a room, cost around $50,000, and had only 5 Mb of storage, it is still considered a highly innovative device for its time. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 has 200,000 times the capacity of the IBM 305 RAMAC at a fraction of the size and will cost only $399 when launched on Q1 2007 (compared to the $50,000 price tag of the IBM 305 when it was launched).
The technical specifications of the Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive are also of some interest since it will come with a 32 MB cache (compared to existing 16 MB on most current high capacity hard drives). The rest is quite typical: 7200 RPM, 8.7 ms average seek time, SATA 3.0 Gbit/s interface, and of course five platters with 148 billion bits per square inch (maximum) of aerial density.
Other companies are apparently not too far behind Hitachi in the high capacity race and Seagate has also announced that it will introduce a 1 TB hard drive in first half of 2007.
