[hw identification] What is this?

[Bubba]

Greetings to all,

A guy claims that he sells the "hard drive" from the immage, 819 MB from
'84. Even when I excluded PC and such drives, it still seems to be
unrealisticaly big for that age, and the "drive" itself looks rather odd.

http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/70/ibmun2.jpg

Practical joke or something real?

TIA!

 

[Todd H.]

Greetings to all,

A guy claims that he sells the "hard drive" from the immage, 819 MB from
'84. Even when I excluded PC and such drives, it still seems to be
unrealisticaly big for that age, and the "drive" itself looks rather odd.

http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/70/ibmun2.jpg

Practical joke or something real?

Looks like the size of an IBM mainframe DASD platter and the size
seems plausible, perhaps fro this era:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html


In 87 anyway they were up 3.7Gb per disk on those, so it seems
reasoanble that an 819MB disk existed in 94.

 

[Todd H.]

Looks like the size of an IBM mainframe DASD platter and the size
seems plausible, perhaps fro this era:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html


In 87 anyway they were up 3.7Gb per disk on those, so it seems
reasoanble that an 819MB disk existed in 94.

err, meant to say '84.

 

[Impmon]

A guy claims that he sells the "hard drive" from the immage, 819 MB from
'84. Even when I excluded PC and such drives, it still seems to be
unrealisticaly big for that age, and the "drive" itself looks rather odd.

It's real. I have a hard drive a bit like that but in large metal
enclosure. Mine was a feeble 50MB but then again, it's a few years
older than one your picture shows. The old one I have has a hefty
power requirement reaching 20A on 110v. That's about the same as
running 2 or 3 toaster ovens on high setting at once

Large platter does hold a lot of data and 800+ MB is possible in mid
80's. Those drives are usually for corporate or government uses as
it's too big physically to be used in home computers, beside most home
computer users got alone fine with only floppy disks or casette drive
in that time era.

I don't know if anyone still makes huge hard drive but if if those
two-footers are still in production their capacity could easily be in
several terabyte range.