$94 Trillion Petabyte

IBM is celebrating the 55^th 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.