Humongous to Nano

This week, two news items hit the tech wire which caught my eye. The most recent was a detailed article on pcworld.com (which I found via engadget.com) marking the 50th anniversary of the disk drive. This first disk drive, or RAMAC, is described as "humongous", had a seek time of "less than a second", stored all of 5 Megabytes and cost a whopping $10,000 per megabyte.

The other news item was an announcement from Samsung for a new 32 Gigabit NAND flash device that can be "used in memory cards with densities of up to 64-Gigabytes." Using 40-nanometer fabrication technology, this device is everything the RAMAC would have been if it only it could have been.

Perhaps the most, um, striking comparison is that the 5MB RAMAC would have held "one 5-minute MP3" file while a 64GB card can store "16,000 MP3 music files." Yes, someone's using some odd math to arrive at their conversions, but what's important is that given 50 platters spinning at 1200 RPM, you wouldn't have sustained the 128Kbit per second data rate out. And I don't even want to think what the connecting cable for my MP3 player would have looked like.

And for those of you wondering, no, I wasn't in school in 1956... yet <grin>.

-Jim