The world’s first hard drive weighed 1 ton and had to be transported by plane

Hard disks are found in every computer today and are neither large nor heavy. In many computers there are even several mass storage devices. But the first commercial hard drive was not only really expensive, it was also incredibly heavy.

Computers and gaming PCs today are no larger than moving boxes and therefore fit under the desk. One of many components is the hard drive, on which users store their data or install their operating system. Hard drives today are hardly much larger than two BluRay cases stacked on top of each other. And for many users it is even worth installing an SSD in their PC.

But a few years ago things were very different. The first commercial hard drive built into a computer was not only much larger, it also weighed more than a ton.

A 5 megabyte hard drive weighs a ton

What is this device? The hard drive is the IBM 350. The hard drive consisted of 50 aluminum disks coated on both sides with a magnetic layer. The individual disks could rotate at a speed of 1,200 revolutions per minute (“revolution per minute”, RPM for short).

Otherwise, the dimensions are hardly comparable to today’s conventional hard drives. Because the aluminum plates made the hard drive a real monster:

• The body of an IBM 350 was 1.72 meters high, 1.52 meters long and 74 centimeters wide
• Overall, the hard drive weighed 971 kilograms. You could even install two of them in the IBM 305 RAMAC.

With a size of around two refrigerators and a weight of a good ton, the hard drive had other tasks than backing up computer games. The IBM 350 was part of the IBM computer 305 RAMAC and was used at the 1960 Winter Olympics, for example. Here the IBM computer was used as the first electronic data processing system for the games and was also able to record punch cards.

How much does a hard drive cost? Unlike today, you couldn’t go to the store and buy a new hard drive back then. It used to be common to rent computers and hard drives.

So you could rent the IBM 305 RAMAC directly from the manufacturer. And that wasn’t exactly cheap. Because on top of the $3,200 a month for the computer alone, there was an additional $650 for the hard drive.

IBM feared that the hard disk would replace the punched card

What did it actually start with? The punch card stands at the beginning of the development of data processing. The computer could then read the holes punched in the card. In the beginning, computers could only record their data via these punch cards.

The problem with punch cards is one thing above all: the large amount of space required. After all, the punch cards have to be stored somewhere when they are not being used. The storage was then significantly simplified by using magnetic tape as a storage medium.

Because significantly larger storage volumes fit on the magnetic tapes. A few megabytes fit on such a tape. For comparison: punch cards could only store about 80 bytes. A byte is one millionth of a megabyte.

That doesn’t sound like much, but it was a huge step forward for the time. Around 64,000 punch cards fit on the IBM 350 presented here, with which you could otherwise have filled a whole room (or even 2 rooms). In addition, you didn’t always have to fetch the right punch card from the cupboard, because the hard disk made everything much faster.

The memory size of 5 MB was revolutionary back then, but is ridiculous today. Even almost a million times over is still not enough for some users:

1 TB hard drive for gaming 2022 – too little or more than enough?