Who Made/Makes the World Smallest Harddrive

From: Paul Koning <pkoning_at_equallogic.com>
Date: Sat Dec 18 12:43:02 2004

>>>>> "Andy" == Andy Holt <andyh_at_andyh-rayleigh.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

>> Smallest in size, or in capacity? My first hard drive was a
>> Shugart 5 meg drive, MFM encoding. Was there ever a smaller hard
>> drive by capacity for the 'PeeCee' or otherwise? 5 megs was a LOT
>> of space at the time.
>>
 Andy> Probably nothing of smaller capacity in modern days, but much
 Andy> smaller ones used to exist .... ask PDP8 people about the df32
 Andy> disk :-)

...or RC64, on a PDP11... I had RT11 on one of those.

 Andy> My experience of early hard disks was with the ICT EDS-4 which
 Andy> stored 4M 6-bit characters (ie about 3 MB) - the (exchangeable)
 Andy> disk pack was close to the size of a complete PC ... the drives
 Andy> were referred to as "washing machines" because of their size
 Andy> and appearance. (and the controller was about the same size
 Andy> also). The IBM equivalent was, I think, the 1311 ... the 2311
 Andy> being equivalent to the ICT EDS-8 (which had twice as many
 Andy> tracks as the eds4 but was otherwise identical)

1311, indeed. Used one on a 1620. 100 cylinders, 20 sectors per
track I think, 100 digits per sector. The head actuator was
hydraulic, and once sprang a leak, spraying hydraulic fluid all over
the system pack...

 Andy> Then our PDP11 had an RK05 which was of similar capacity but
 Andy> somewhat more compact.

Much higher... 2.4 MB on just one platter.

     paul
Received on Sat Dec 18 2004 - 12:43:02 GMT