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While the storage capacity was limited and the price high (around $1,000), this marked the beginning of a transition to flash memory as an alternative to traditional hard drives. [136] In the 1990s, new manufacturers of flash memory drives emerged, including STEC, Inc., [137] M-Systems, [138] [139] and BiTMICRO. [140] [141]
Software reports hard disk drive or memory capacity in different forms using either decimal or binary prefixes. The Microsoft Windows family of operating systems uses the binary convention when reporting storage capacity, so an HDD offered by its manufacturer as a 1 TB drive is reported by these operating systems as a 931 GB HDD.
The storage limit for ATA-1 compliant disks introduced in 1994. 1.6 × 10 12 bits (200 gigabytes) – capacity of a hard disk that would be considered average as of 2008. In 2005 a 200 GB harddisk cost US$100, [5] equivalent to $156 in 2023. As of April 2015, this is the maximum capacity of a fingernail-sized microSD card. 2 41
For example, the first commercial hard drive, IBM's RAMAC in 1957, supplied 3.75 MB for $34,500, or $9,200 per megabyte. In 1989, a 40 MB hard drive cost $1200, or $30/MB. And in 2018, 4 Tb drives sold for $75, or 1.9¢/GB, an improvement of 1.5 million since 1989 and 520 million since the RAMAC.
The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. When hard drives became available for personal computers, they offered 5-megabyte capacity. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity in the range of 500 megabyte to 1 gigabyte. [6] As of October 2024 hard disk drives up to 32 TB were available. [7]
The exact capacity of a given drive model is usually slightly larger than the class designation. Practically all manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices [5] [6] continue to define one gigabyte as 1 000 000 000 bytes, which is displayed on the packaging.