History of hard disk drives

IBM in 1953 recognized the immediate application for what it termed a "Random Access File" having high capacity, rapid random access at a relatively low cost. After considering several alternative technologies such as wire matrices, rod arrays, drums, drum arrays, etc, the engineers at IBM San Jose invented the disk drive.

            The commercial usage of hard disk drives began in 1956 with the shipment of an IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model 350 disk storage. 

            Compared to modern disk drives, early hard disk drives were large, sensitive and cumbersome devices, more suited to use in the protected environment of a data center than in an industrial environment, office or home. Disk media was nominally 8-inch or 14-inch platters, which required large equipment rack enclosures. Drives with removable media resembled washing machines in size and often required high-current or a three-phase power supply due to the large motors they used. Hard disk drives were not commonly used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard drives, with a formatted capacity of 5 megabytes.

            The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity of about 1 GB. As of July 2010, desktop hard disk drives typically have a capacity of 500 to 1000 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity drives are 3 terabytes.

1950s - 1970s

                         IBM 350

The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head assembly having two heads was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow (just under 1 second).

            The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit, announced in 1961, introduced the usage of a head for each data surface with the heads having self acting air bearings (flying heads).                                                                            

            Also in 1961, Bryant Computer Products introduced its 4000 series disk drives. These massive units stood 52 inches (1.3 m) tall, 70 inches (1.8 m) wide, and had up to 26 platters, each 39 inches (0.99 m) in diameter, rotating at up to 1200 rpm. Access times were from 50 to 205 ms. The drive's total capacity, depending on the number of platters installed, was up to 205,377,600 bytes, or 196 MiB.

            The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive, which used the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters.

In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated media. All modern disk drives now use this technology and/or derivatives thereof. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of it was planned to have two 30 MB spindles; however, the actual product shipped with two spindles for data modules of either 35 MB or 70 MB.

1980s, the PC era

            Internal drives became the system of choice on PCs in the 1980s. Most microcomputer hard disk drives in the early 1980s were not sold under their manufacturer's names, but by OEMs as part of larger peripherals (such as the Corvus Disk System and the Apple ProFile). The IBM PC/XT shipped with a standard internal 10MB hard disk drive; however, and this started a trend toward buying "bare" drives (often by mail order) and installing them directly into a system. One interesting exception was Apple Computer's 10MB "widget" proprietary HDD introduced in 1984 and discontinued along with the Lisa a year later.

            External hard drives remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh and other platforms. Every Mac made between 1986 and 1998 has a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion easy; also, "toaster" Compact Macs did not have easily accessible hard drive bays (or, in the case of the Mac Plus, any hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option.

Timeline

Capacity timeline on personal computer (PC)

1980s to present day

• 1980 - The world's first gigabyte-capacity disk drive, the IBM 3380, was the size of a refrigerator, weighed 550 pounds (about 250 kg), and had a price tag of $40,000
• 1986 - Standardization of SCSI
• 1989 - Jimmy Zhu and H. Neal Bertram from UCSD proposed exchange decoupled granular microstructure for thin film disk storage media, still used today.
• 1991 - 2.5-inch 100 megabyte hard drive
• 1991 - PRML Technology (Digital Read Channel with 'Partial Response Maximum Likelihood' algorithm)
• 1992 - first 1.3-inch hard disk drive - HP Kittyhawk
• 1994 - IBM introduces Laser Textured Landing Zones (LZT)
• 1996 - IBM introduces GMR (Giant MR) Technology for read sensors
• 1998 - UltraDMA/33 and ATAPI standardized
• 1999 - IBM releases the Microdrive in 170 MB and 340 MB capacities
• 2002 - 137 GB addressing space barrier broken
• 2003 - Serial ATA introduced
• 2005 - First 500 GB hard drive shipping (Hitachi GST)
• 2005 - Serial ATA 3Gbps standardized
• 2005 - Seagate introduces Tunnel MagnetoResistive Read Sensor (TMR) and Thermal Spacing Control
• 2005 - Introduction of faster SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)
• 2005 - First Perpendicular recording HDD shipped: Toshiba 1.8-inch 40/80 GB
• 2006 - First 750 GB hard drive (Seagate)
• 2006 - First 200 GB 2.5" hard drive utilizing Perpendicular recording (Toshiba)
• 2006 - Fujitsu develops heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that could one day achieve one terabit per square inch densities.
• 2007 - First 1 terabyte hard drive(Hitachi GST)
• 2008 - First 1.5 terabyte hard drive (Seagate)
• 2009 - First 2.0 terabyte hard drive (Western Digital)
• 2010 - First 3TB Hard drive  (Seagate)

Predictions

• 2010 - 2.5 & 5-platter 3TB Hard drives expected, manufacturer claims by TDK and Western Digital

2011 - 4TB Hard drives expected, Hitachi claim

Capacity timeline on personal computer (PC)

1980s to present day

• 1980 - The world's first gigabyte-capacity disk drive, the IBM 3380, was the size of a refrigerator, weighed 550 pounds (about 250 kg), and had a price tag of $40,000
• 1986 - Standardization of SCSI
• 1989 - Jimmy Zhu and H. Neal Bertram from UCSD proposed exchange decoupled granular microstructure for thin film disk storage media, still used today.
• 1991 - 2.5-inch 100 megabyte hard drive
• 1991 - PRML Technology (Digital Read Channel with 'Partial Response Maximum Likelihood' algorithm)
• 1992 - first 1.3-inch hard disk drive - HP Kittyhawk
• 1994 - IBM introduces Laser Textured Landing Zones (LZT)
• 1996 - IBM introduces GMR (Giant MR) Technology for read sensors
• 1998 - UltraDMA/33 and ATAPI standardized
• 1999 - IBM releases the Microdrive in 170 MB and 340 MB capacities
• 2002 - 137 GB addressing space barrier broken
• 2003 - Serial ATA introduced
• 2005 - First 500 GB hard drive shipping (Hitachi GST)
• 2005 - Serial ATA 3Gbps standardized
• 2005 - Seagate introduces Tunnel MagnetoResistive Read Sensor (TMR) and Thermal Spacing Control
• 2005 - Introduction of faster SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)
• 2005 - First Perpendicular recording HDD shipped: Toshiba 1.8-inch 40/80 GB
• 2006 - First 750 GB hard drive (Seagate)
• 2006 - First 200 GB 2.5" hard drive utilizing Perpendicular recording (Toshiba)
• 2006 - Fujitsu develops heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that could one day achieve one terabit per square inch densities.
• 2007 - First 1 terabyte hard drive (Hitachi GST)
• 2008 - First 1.5 terabyte hard drive (Seagate)
• 2009 - First 2.0 terabyte hard drive (Western Digital)
• 2010 - First 3TB Hard drive (Seagate)