Photos: A brief history of drives

The prosaically labelled Hard Disk Drive Corner takes us back to a time when drives were big and engineers were nervous.

This H-6584 system from 1967 looks like it would fit perfectly into a 1960s laminex kitchen, but actually boasts what was then a massive amount of data — 7.25MB.

Fast-forward to 1985 and things were improving substantially — this H-6585 had graduated to 5GB. OK, it's less storage capacity than an iPhone, but it's quite possibly still more useful.

Despite advances in size, the era of ugly drive containers that looked like filing cabinets was far from over. This H-6587 from 1990 stored 11.3GB.

The left-hand drive is the core of the H-6587 unit seen in the previous picture. Do not try installing this in your desktop system.

Rapid advances mean that by 2002, 3.5-inch drives (ranging here from 146GB to 300GB) were the universal standard. It's a pity they don't come in green plastic anymore.

Angus Kidman travelled to Tokyo as a guest of HDS.