Gregory's ServerThe Bryant 4000C disk drive (1965) was absurdly large. The drive was 52" tall, weighed 3551 pounds, and held 205 megabytes. Now you can get a 1TB flash drive: 5000 times the storage for 1/50,000 the weight.
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@kenshirriff Oddly enough another company in Walled Lake, Williams Research, focused on rotation .. small gas turbine engines.    @kenshirriff love that they called this 1.5 ton monstrosity "mass memory". It sure was!  @kenshirriff why did they pose a Computer next to this main frame array ? With her glasses off? Is this to show that her role is obsolete? @kenshirriff reading the brochure, MTBF was 2000-3000 hours. At 12 hours a day thatβs 250 days. Somebody check my math. @kenshirriff - Larger even than the SDS Sigma RAD head-per-track disks - 63"x30"x29" (HxWxD) - https://bitsavers.org/pdf/sds/sigma/periph/900979C_7201_7202_7203_7204_RAD_Oct69.pdf  We have a platter of that kind of size in datamuseum.dk, but I do not recall what it was from. Always good for "our disk is bigger than your disk" jokes :-)  @kenshirriff man 205MB was astronomical back then though, right? And I mean you have random access - more random than on a magnetic tape. @kenshirriff I like what you write on computer history. @kenshirriff those head crashes deserved the name probably. I can see sparks and small parts flying out of the drive. π  @kenshirriff You can get one that is 12 grams, 1/134,000th of the weight of that monster. I appreciate the numerical alliteration with the fives, mind.   @kenshirriff I seem to recall Ken Thompson talking about how the original filesystem he wrote for Unix was to do timings on a single-platter drive of about this size that spun really fast, attached to the infamous PDP-7 he found in the attic.  Well, without such things (aka inventions) you wouldn't have any flash drives/SSD etc. today. π But maybe something better? π€π @kenshirriff in other words: the golden age of advertising for computer storage is over. The women in sheath dress and high heels would probably fall over when leaning on the storage device (which would be barely visible on the picture anyways π ) @kenshirriff 'My time' started about 10 years after this when I had unrestricted access rights to machine rooms. Exchangeable disc packs were common, there were multiple read/write heads which operated in parallel, sequential sectors were interspersed to allow for processing during rotational delays. You organised data in cylinders to avoid moving heads and in vertical 'stacks' (can't remember the actual term) for fastest R/W speed. @kenshirriff Take a microSD card and the weight factor is even more impressive. They weight about 0.3 g so 4.830.000 of them make up the weight of a Bryant 4000C. Also available in 1 TB, and 2 TB was announced last year.  @kenshirriff yeah yeah yeah. Enough about the girl. Tell me about that dinosaur she's leaning against. @kenshirriff and in this one The Computer is looking longingly at the mainframe array .  @kenshirriff Big, heavy, slow and power hungry, but your data was safer than on a modern SanDisk SSD... π  @kenshirriff And it was "as low as" 0.06 cents per byte (0.58 cents in today's dollars) and had an MTBF of 2,000 to 3,000 hours. Smaller and less resource consuming is better? |
Each disk platter was 39 inches in diameter and had 12 heads reading it. A complicated hydraulic system moved the heads. The edge of the platter moved much faster than the center, so the disk was divided into 6 zones, writing at higher frequencies as you go toward the edge.