The disk drive celebrates its 50th birthday today. There has been a lot of progress since then, adding many, many GB's to its capacity, and shrinking it to a nice palm-sized design.

The first disk drive built by IBM, in what is now known as Silicon Valley, known as the RAMAC held 5 megabytes of data on 50 disks. The 24-inch diameter of the 305 RAMAC computer made this machine a little hard to move around when it was released on September 13th 1956. Compare that to the 1-inch micro-drives that hold 8GB's of data and fit in your shirt pocket. IBM recently took some time to look back at the technology they grew by watching an old black and white film of the first spinning disk getting a coat of magnetic slurry.

IBM's current research projects include flash memory, power and cooling, virtualization, and long term 100 year plus storage, and storage management's software.