$94 Trillion Petabyte

June 21, 2011 byGleb Budman // 8 Comments

IBM first hard drive

IBM is celebrating the 55th anniversary of the first hard drive. At the time, this was a breakthrough that would change the path of technology.

However, to put into perspective how far we’ve all come:

The hard drive IBM shipped in 1956:

  • Stored five megabytes
  • Cost $11,000 per megabyte
  • Was 60 inches long x 68 inches high x 29 inches deep
  • Weighed about one ton

In today’s dollars that would mean:

A $179 16GB iPod Nano:

  • Stores 3,200 times more data
  • Would cost $1,429,176,320
  • Requires eight semi-truck shipping containers to hold the data

A petabyte of storage would:

  • Cost $93,662,499,307,520
  • Require a building the size of 10,814 football fields to hold the drives
  • Require 472 of the world’s largest data centers to hold the drives

Compare that to being able to get a petabyte of storage for $117,000 and store it in a single rack. Of course, IBM researchers from the ’50s are clearly some of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Note: $1 in 1956 is $7.93 in 2010 adjusted for inflation.

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About Gleb Budman

Gleb Budman is a co-founder and has served as our chief executive officer since 2007, guiding the business from its inception in a Palo Alto apartment to a company serving customers in more than 175 countries with over an exabyte of data under management. Gleb has served as a member of our board of directors since 2009 and as chairperson since January 2021. Prior to Backblaze, Gleb was the senior director of product management at SonicWall and the vice president of products at MailFrontier, which was acquired by SonicWall. Before that, he served in a senior position at Kendara, which was acquired by Excite@Home, and previously founded and successfully exited two other startup companies.

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