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Pic: One gigabyte over 20 years

I think that was a HDA (head disk assembly) from a 3380 IBM drive. If I remember correctly, those weighed about 80lbs. Time wise your close, late 80s (hence the J designation - which was the higher speed unit that came out a little later than the initial 3380s). See - http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3380.html
The larger cabinets in the rear each contained 2 HDAs. Four cabinets are shown in the pic.

In fact, I seem to remember some advisory on the unit that said it required two people to put in place.

And boy do I feel old now..thanks

This reminds me of when I worked for the Navy in 1970 on a computerized phone system. We had memory frames (toroid) that each held 256 bytes (yes, bytes) and weighed about 20 pounds each. It would take 3906250 of these to make a gig. That would weigh 39062.5 tons.

Slightly more than an SD card.

For fun and profit we pulled magnets from the DASD units and used the magnet to troll for fishing reels at the bottom of Lake Houston. It made for a fun morning when the fish weren't biting.
Geo

I started in this business 40 years ago. At that time, a Gigabyte would have cost $50,000,000 for disk, for RAM $1,000,000,000 (1 billion bucks) and taken acres of computer room floor.

(sigh) This is from the days when computing was done by real men, and the junior operator did the pizza run.

Knowing IBM pricing, the owner is probably still making payments on that 1GB IBM drive, better hook it back up!