The world's first hard drive held 5 megabytes of data and cost about $50,000.
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The IBM 305 RAMAC was announced in 1958. It was the size of two refigerators and weighed over a ton. Over a thousand units were produced and they were in use for about a decade.
In comparison, a modern smartphone with 64 gig of RAM can hold about 13,000 times more data and weighs only a few ounces.
According to Neal Campbell:
While 5MBs seems like nothing today, it was the equivalent of 64,000 punched cards! The container could have held more disks, and therefore could have had more storage capacity. The 5MB limit was set by IBM’s marketing department. They couldn’t figure out a sales pitch for anything greater than 5MBs
