Who Made/Makes the World Smallest Harddrive

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "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