A brief history of hard drives

In 1982, Hitachi shipped the first drive with more than 1GB of storage. The 1.2GB H-8598, seen here, consisted of 10 14-inch platters and two read-write heads. Six years later, Hitachi shipped a 1.89GB drive made from eight 9.5-inch disks, which reduced the kilogram-to-gigabyte ratio from 121 kilograms per gigabyte to 42. Hitachi claimed this later drive was the first mainframe class drive that a single human could carry.