The importance and influence of hard disk technology—the technology introduced to the world with RAMAC—can be seen in almost every aspect of daily life. The computer on which you’re reading this text almost certainly has a hard disk drive as part of its basic hardware. In the workplace, e-mail messages, customer data, sales records, human resources information and many other workaday documents are all stored on hard drives—technology invented in an IBM lab a half century ago.
Commercial disk storage systems
Today, the IBM System Storage® DS8700 is a hard-disk-based storage system from IBM and a direct descendant of the 305 RAMAC. One DS8700 cabinet is almost the same size as a disk storage unit in RAMAC, but it can hold up to 2048 terabytes of data—more than 400 million times the capacity of RAMAC.
Worldwide data storage
When RAMAC was introduced, it revolutionized how organizations stored and used data. In the late 1950s, the handful of customers using RAMAC stored 5–10 MB of data. From these humble beginnings, the hard disk has changed the way organizations do business. Today, most companies store huge amounts of data and almost all of this data is stored on hard disk drives. According to industry analyst IDC, in the second quarter of 2010 alone, organizations worldwide bought 3645 petabytes of disk storage capacity. It would take more than 730 billion of the original RAMAC systems to meet these demands.
Personal computers
In 1983, the IBM Personal Computer XT introduced the hard drive to PCs. A standard model XT had a 10 MB hard drive based on the same principles as the RAMAC drive. The first disk drives known as "RAMAC" were about 10 megabits—just over 1 MB—of capacity and weighed 10 tons. Put in perspective, the average laptop today would weigh about 250,000 tons based on that technology. Thankfully, IBM’s drive to innovate over the last half century has shrunk the weight of large-capacity disk storage down to the ounces hidden within laptop computers that are easily carried in backpacks and briefcases.