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By JOE GRANESE September 20, 2006 The eternal quest for better computer storage   It is a story told frequently at the world famous Granese Institute of Technology. We take particular glee in discussing our timeline in the information industry, one that parallels the history of personal computing in the modern age. Today, after a particularly debilitating day, we took advantage of a visit from the renowned Cybergeezer to recount a favorite tale, the history of the hard drive. It is one of particular significance, as Sept. 13 marks the 50th anniversary of that ubiquitous peripheral. The story started as usual, prompted by someone complaining about needing more room on their hard drive. I know the feeling. With nearly a terabyte of storage installed in the Granese server, I’m down to a scant few dozen gigabytes at home.   From punch card to floppy disc The concept of a terabyte was beyond comprehension back in the day. Information had been stored on paper tape and punch cards for years. Magnetic storage in the form of enormous tape drives was the norm. Newer technology floppy disks were truly floppy, some of them an unwieldy 8 inches square. Home computer users were a rare breed as the world welcomed the ’80s. We were content to store programs on cassette tape when the IBM Personal Computer walked into our lives boasting a big fat 360 KB of floppy disk storage. This was something truly revolutionary, affording fast loading of the spiffy new disk operating system, or DOS, as well as the saving of data for exceptionally easy access later. It was a tremendous innovation, but as always, we were soon dissatisfied. 360KB was not enough, of course. We wanted more storage space, with faster writing and retrieval. We wanted it all. Soon, IBM delivered.   Hard disk storage evolves Flash back to San Jose, Calif. in 1956, when IBM engineers faced the same problem. They needed someplace to store their data that would allow faster data retrieval than the magnetic tapes currently in use. Their solution came to be known as RAMAC, for random access method of accounting control. It was the very first hard disk. Sparing you all but the most colorful details, RAMAC was twice the size of your refrigerator. It held 24 gigantic platters, each coated with a special magnetic paint to record the information. The cost of RAMAC in today’s dollars would be somewhere around $75,000. Its total capacity was right around 5MB. For the next few years, hard-disk storage was the exclusive province of corporate computing. Aside from a few truly depraved geeks, there really was no personal computing community. Additionally, while the size had come down and the capacity had increased, the devices were still truly cumbersome. By the end of the ’70s, technology had filtered down to small business and eventually to home users. That’s where I rejoin the timeline. Like any geek worth his or her pocket protector, I was hamstrung by my two-floppy IBM PC and spent much of my idle time lusting after a faster computer with one of those fabulous new hard-disk storage devices. Five MB devices had already hit the market, but I decided to hold off. I knew that something new was coming out of IBM, and I was hoping to catch on at the beginning of a trend for a change. At that time, I was happy to cobble together system improvements from whatever leftover hardware I could find. One day in the mid-1980s I decided that the time was right. My pockets full of 10s and 20s I had stashed for just such an occasion, I found myself waiting for the opening of a now long-gone computer store in Ardmore, Pa. After essentially filling out an application to buy the thing, I walked out of the store beaming, the proud owner of an IBM PC-AT equipped with an astonishing 1.2MB floppy disk drive and an incomprehensibly huge 20MB hard drive. I was in a state of total tech euphoria, and was not seen by family and friends for days.   We demand faster, greater, but smaller storage As always, that huge hard drive was full in a few months. Those big, fat floppies that were so spacious at first had begun to pile up everywhere. I needed more space, and I needed it fast. That brings us back to today. This phenomenon is a rondo theme that recurs in the lives of personal computing devotees everywhere. It is the same annoyed feeling I get when I have to burn information to DVD in order to make room on my internal hard drives. Does that sound familiar to you? If so, don’t worry. You won’t have to go to Ardmore and shell out three grand. In fact, hard drive upgrades are remarkably inexpensive these days. They are available virtually anywhere, and can actually be installed by a home user with average computing skills. Here is how it works. Once you have determined that you are running out of space, you have two options. You can buy a new computer, or you can install a bigger drive. The former, while more expensive, is sometimes worth considering, depending on the age of your current computer. Users of otherwise competent computers that came equipped with 40 and 80GB drives are candidates for a simple hard drive upgrade.   Upgrading hard drives Younger users can fill an 80GB drive with MP3s in a few weeks. Adults scanning family photos or archiving home video can do it even faster. For both, the solution is simple. We visited a major supplier of personal and business computing with a local retail presence and checked out the market. There are currently two major types of hard drive installed in personal computers. The older, smaller, IDE interface, sometimes called ATAPI or PATA, are slowly going away, replaced by the newer, faster Serial ATA interface, or SATA. In typical Information Age form, SATA2 is right around the corner. It is important to know what kind of drive your computer supports before shopping for a new one. Our trip yielded a fast, quiet 200GB brand-name drive for well under $100. >From there, installation can be as simple as bolting it in as a slave drive and using it as extra storage, leaving your original drive in place and intact. That is, of course, too simple for us. We typically install the newer drive, which is usually faster, as the primary, and relegate the original device to storage duty. This takes much more time, and greater skills, including the ability to reinstall the computer’s operating system software and transfer necessary data to the new drive. That can actually take a day or more of solid work to complete satisfactorily. Still, the end result is you, sitting at your computer, with room for another few thousand MP3s, a couple of hours of home video, or a few more decades’ worth of family photos. Having enough storage is a wonderful luxury today, just as it was in the ’80s. Thanks to the brilliant minds at IBM’s San Jose lab, we’re good to go until the next big thing comes down the line. If your hard drive is full, or if you just replaced one and would like to tell the story, drop me a note at Granese@juno.com.