Lauren WeinsteinSeagate is now shipping 44TB hard drives, using lasers to increase stored data density. They expect to reach 100TB in the not distant future, all in the same form factor that has been standard for decades. My first personally owned hard drive was 10MB, an 8-inch "Winchester" in a case twice the size as the disk to include the power supply and other electronics. It died after a few weeks. I won't even detail the disks I dealt with for PDP-11s -- massive multidisk platters that we'd take in and out of drives the size of washing machines. A bit less than 100MB formatted for the RP04.
Long ago when I ran the PDP-11's at the Bland Corporation, I used to like staring into the RP04s when they were running. They had transparent glass covers and the high speed spinning was mesmerizing -- to me anyway. Bizarrely, when I had to replace my (almost 40 year old?) clothes washer recently, the new one has a direct drive motor that spins the drum so fast (with a similar glass cover) that it is very reminiscent of the RP04 experience.
ideaPDishFront loaders or top loaders?
How long did it take to figure out you could put clothes in one or the other.
@ipd Top load, just like the RP04!