The History Of The Hard Drive
The first commercial hard drive was invented and distributed by IBM in 1956. The drive was named the IBM 350 and was shipped inside of an accounting machine named the IBM 305 RAMAC. This drive was the size of a modern day refrigerator. IBM had a strict requirement that every one of its products need to be able to fit through a standard doorframe and the IBM 305 RAMAC just barely fit through the door. The IBM 250 had fifty 24-inch platters and had the maximum capacity of 4.4 megabytes.
The first drive only had one read write head to search through all of its 50 platters. Eventually they added a second set of heads. This technology was improved upon in many ways till it was taken off the market by 1969.
Rey Johnson ran this team of engineers at IBM. It is a little known fact that 12 of the researchers of the original hard drive left IBM to open their own digital memory companies. These twelve men are known as the IBM “Dirty Dozen.” A group of those twelve founded the company Memorex. One of their names was Al Shugart. Mr. Shugart eventually left Memorex and founded his own company, Seagate. All hard drive manufactures from then on had some help from one of the IBM Dirty Dozen.
Hard drives were very similar to the IBM 350 till Seagate released the next breakthrough in hard drives, the ST-506. This drive was a much smaller hard drive than anything previous to it. It has platters with the diameter of 5.25 inches and could hold a formatted capacity of 5 Megabytes. This drive used the processor power of the host computer to perform all of its functions. This greatly decreased the drives speed and usability. Modern drives have their own processor to perform all its own functions.
The ST-506 was a major breakthrough in hard drive design. It was ten times smaller and cheaper than any of the competition it had. This is when Seagate secured their role as the giant of the hard drive industry. To this day, Seagate is still the highest selling hard drive brand.
The ST-506 was the beginning of the personal computer area. From that point on all consumers wanted internal hard drives for their personal computers. The first standard in internal hard drives was the SCSI interface. Apple computers immediately made this the standard interface on all of their computers. Hard drives gradually increased in size building on the foundation set by the ST-506.
The next generation of hard drive breakthroughs comes with the different designs applied to the heads and platters. I write about these specific breakthroughs more in depths in my platter and read write head presentations. The biggest breakthrough was perpendicular recording. Perpendicular recording allows hard drives to nearly triple in size with no other additional modifications. Seagate invented perpendicular recording in 2005.
Since the invention of perpendicular recording drive capacity has doubled every year. The newest high capacity drive is from Seagate and it peaks out at a whopping 1.5 terabytes. It would have three hundred thousand of the first hard drives put side by side to reach the same capacity that Seagate drives fits into a consumer desktop appliance.
Today hard drives face major competition from solid-state drives, or SSD. SSD’s are much quieter, use less power, and are much more reliable that hard drives. Their only downside right now is their lack of capacity. Currently the most cutting edge SSD’s peak out around the 70 GB capacity levels. Due to this competition hard drive engineers have begun to develop the future of hard drives.
One major technology that is being researched is Nano-RAM. Nano-Ram is a very complicated technology dealing with electrons keeping their state even when power is lost. Current ram chips lose all their data when the power is switched off. This technology uses much less power than current technology and has the possibility of creating drives small enough to fit in a cell phone but still capable of holding terabytes of information.
Hard drives are still the standard for storing a multitude of digitally encoded data and they are here to stay. Even with competition from SSD’s they are still the media of choice for sensitive information. If you have any questions about the history of hard drives please email me at Fhernandez@netcba.com or call Frank at (305) 228-6163.