From 1956 to 2010
In 1956, the RAMAC 305 stored 5 million characters. Today, hard drives store as much as 3TB of data, and solid-state technology is quickly approaching a terabyte of capacity in a single drive. On the far right, a USB flash drive as small as a quarter holds 16GB of data, while a 1.8-in mini-drive holds as much as 160GB.
Return to Computer History Museum to highlight storage, from RAMAC to microdrives
Photo courtesy of IBM, Hitachi and SuperTalent.