What type of early computer memory is this disk?

It’s a hard disk. Furniture size.

@Zaku Bingo, early hard drives were the size of a couple refrigerators.
The light orange color is iron oxide – rust, deposited a few molecules thick on highly polished metal disks.
The size description sounds like an IBM either mid-60’s 1311 that used six 14-inch platters to hold 2.6MB, or a late 70’s drive for a 3370 mainframe. Those stored 571 MB on seven 14-inch platters.

Check out this pic
That must be from the original (1956) IBM RAMAC that had 50 24-inch platters to hold 5 MB.

Wikipedia has an article on History of hard disk drives. I remember around 1981 when the first “Winchester” hard drives became available for IBM-PC systems. 10 megabytes was standard, which seemed like a massive amount of storage at a time when most files were just a few KB.

@gasman Boy has capacity (and use!) changed, eh?
I remember the first Windows “PC” I owned had an enormous 25 MB drive on it…
These days I couldn’t fit two 18 Mpixel RAW photo files on that.

Sounds like an old harddrive disk.

@dabbler It’s a kind of Parkinson’s law of software: Digital storage requirements expand as hardware speeds up, keeping pace and them some. Moore’s law has operated for a long time but it’s never enough for the voracious appetite of applications.

The notion of storing images containing millions of pixels – your everyday snapshot today – was inconceivable 35 years ago, when I assembled an Imsai 8080. My first floppy drive stored 180K, upgradeable to 360K. First “app” was a BASIC interpreter that occupied 50 or 60K – bigger than the operating system!