In 1981, Apple released the ProFile hard drive with a whopping 5 megabytes of storage. To put that in perspective, a single iPhone photo today typically takes up 3-5 MB. This entire hard drive couldn't even store two modern photos.

The price tag? A cool $3,499—that's about $11,700 in today's dollars. You were paying roughly $700 per megabyte.

What Could You Actually Store?

Five megabytes in the early 1980s was actually revolutionary. Before hard drives, Apple II users relied on floppy disks that held only 140KB each. The ProFile could replace 35 floppy disks. For business users managing spreadsheets, databases, and word processing documents, this was genuinely life-changing.

Approximately 2,500 pages of plain text
Around 100 VisiCalc spreadsheets
Dozens of AppleWorks databases
Multiple software programs without disk swapping

The Technology Inside

The ProFile (codenamed "Pippin") used a Seagate ST-506 drive mechanism—the very first product from Seagate Technology, a company that would dominate the hard drive industry for decades. Apple designed a custom controller board and wrapped it all in their signature beige case.

The drive was originally built for the Apple III business computer in September 1981. It wasn't until 1983 that Apple released an interface card allowing Apple II owners to use the ProFile with ProDOS and Apple Pascal operating systems.

The Storage Revolution

Today, a microSD card smaller than your fingernail can hold 1 terabyte—that's 200,000 times more storage than the ProFile, and you can buy it for under $100. The ProFile's 5MB platter was the size of a large book and weighed several pounds.

Apple eventually released a 10MB version of the ProFile, though it required a special upgraded interface card to recognize the extra capacity. After the ProFile line, Apple didn't release another hard drive until the Hard Disk 20 for the Macintosh in 1985.

The ProFile represents a pivotal moment when personal computers transitioned from floppy-dependent machines to systems with permanent, readily-accessible storage. That 5MB drive might seem laughable now, but it opened the door to everything we take for granted today.

Related Tags