Hard disks emerged in corporate datacenters in the late 1960s and began to flourish in the 1970s alongside tape drives, which were the primary storage medium at that time (see magnetic tape).

Half a century later, magnetic tape remains surprisingly well-used in government. NASA uses it to back up vast amounts of ...

It proved to be less expensive but slower than drum memory, while being faster and more expensive than tape drives. The first commercial hard disk drive was introduced in 1956 as part of the IBM ...

Unlike tape storage, which required sequential reading to locate data, the RAMAC's hard drive allowed random access, significantly improving retrieval speeds. This marked a major leap forward in ...