HDD Improvements Outperformed Moore’s Law

We got this email from historian Tom Gardner:

You can’t always believe what you read about storage.

Your article HDD Improvements Outperformed Moore’s Law – StorageNewsletter points to the ZDNet article where the author claims storage improvements have outperformed Moore’s Law by a factor of 800%.

Not true by a long shot – the problem is the author picks a point in the 80s to start from but HDDs go back to 1957.

Moore’s law for semiconductors starts in the 1960s with the beginnings of ICs. So a fair comparison starts with the first production HDD, the 1957 IBM RAMAC 350.

If one goes back to the first HDD, the industry is now about 7 years behind a Moore’s law rate and falling further behind each year since areal density is now doubling about every ten years, way below the two years of a Moore’s Law rate.
 
Up to the 90s, IBM leading in areal density more or less tracked Moore’s with an acceleration in the 90s as the industry switched to sputtered media and MR heads but the industry ran out of steam this century and has now fallen well behind any Moore’s law rate – here is the data on the recent trends: