Hard drives are really cool, except for all of the heat they create. They are what is used as permanent storage in the vast majority of personal computers sold today and throughout the last 50 years. IBM created the first hard drive in the 1950s and the evolution of the storage medium has been interesting to say the least. Why? The same principles are used and the general engineering is in some ways very similar; but the amount of storage has increased, and the physical size of the storage device has decreased, both by several orders or magnitude.
Here is a video I would recommend that does a great job of explaining the technology. While I do recommend this video, be warned that there are a few parts that some may consider too boring or too detailed.
The newest hard drives available in the consumer market (think home desktops, not the IT data center you would see at a large business) are available with up to 10 Terabytes (10,000 Gigabytes) in that same physical package and size you saw in that video. I didn’t see the specific model of the hard drive in that video, but it was likely a model that offered between 60 and 320 GB of storage capacity.
Here is a video (beware: no one has ever thought IBM of the 1950s or 1960s was “exciting” and this video created by IBM to show the development process of the first IBM hard drive) that goes over a lot of detail about the creation of the hard drive.
I know it isn’t as exciting as the latest Star Wars movie…..or any of the Star Wars movies, but I hope this little bit of information proved to be somewhat informative.