When was the hard drive first developed?
Areal density (computer storage)
Hard disk drives store data in the magnetic polarization of small patches of the surface coating on a disk. The maximum areal density is defined by the size of the magnetic particles in the surface, as well as the size of the "head" used to read and write the data. The areal density of disk storage devices has increased dramatically since IBM introduced the IBM 350 disk storage, the first hard disk drive in 1956 at an areal density of 2,000 bit/in. The growth rate has matched Moore's Law with the density reaching 1 Tbit/in in 2014. In 2015, Seagate introduced a hard drive at a density of 1.34 Tbit/in, about 600 million times that of the first disk drive. It is expected that current recording technology can be "feasibly" expected to scale to at least 5 Tbit/in in the near future. New technologies like Heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) are under development and are expected to continue magnetic areal density progress.
Optical disc drive
The first Blu-Ray prototype was unveiled by Sony in October 2000, and the first commercial recording device was released to market on April 10, 2003. In January 2005, TDK announced that they had developed an ultra-hard yet very thin polymer coating ("Durabis") for Blu-ray discs; this was a significant technical advance because better protection was desired for the consumer market to protect bare discs against scratching and damage compared to DVD. Technically Blu-ray Disc also required a thinner layer for the narrower beam and shorter wavelength 'blue' laser. The first BD-ROM players (Samsung BD-P1000) were shipped in mid-June 2006. The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released by Sony and MGM on June 20, 2006. The first mass-market Blu-ray Disc rewritable drive for the PC was the BWU-100A, released by Sony on July 18, 2006.
Flying height
The flying height or floating height or head gap is the distance between the disk read/write head on a hard disk drive and the platter. The first commercial hard-disk drive, the IBM 305 RAMAC, used forced air to maintain a 0.002 inch (51 μm) spacing between the head and disk. The IBM 1301, introduced in 1961, was the first disk drive in which the head was attached to a "hydrodynamic air bearing slider," which generates its own cushion of pressurized air, allowing the slider and head to fly much closer, 0.00025 inches (6.35 μm) above the disk surface.
Nanoionic device
The First HDD Hard Drive was made in 1956 by IBM. It weighed nearly 2000 pounds and only could hold 5 MB. The first HDD Drive was 60" long, 68" tall, and 29" wide. It was used in IBM's RAMAC 305,the first computer to use HDD drives.
Hard disk drive
External HDDs remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh. Many Macintosh computers made between 1986 and 1998 featured a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion simple. Older compact Macintosh computers did not have user-accessible hard drive bays (indeed, the Macintosh 128K, Macintosh 512K, and Macintosh Plus did not feature a hard drive bay at all), so on those models external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option for expanding upon any internal storage.
RAM drive
The first software RAM drive for microcomputers was invented and written by Jerry Karlin in the UK in 1979/80. The software, known as the Silicon Disk System was further developed into a commercial product and marketed by JK Systems Research which became Microcosm Research Ltd when the company was joined by Peter Cheesewright of Microcosm Ltd. The idea was to enable the early microcomputers to use more RAM than the CPU could directly address. Making bank-switched RAM behave like a disk drive was much faster than the disk drives - especially in those days before hard drives were readily available on such machines.
Timeline of United States inventions (1946–1991)
1955 Hard disk drive
Zip drive
The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 MB, and then 750 MB.
Areal density (computer storage)
When introduced in 1982 CDs had considerably higher densities than hard disk drives, but hard disk drives have since advanced much more quickly and eclipsed optical media in both areal density and capacity per device.
Dell EMC Unity
Clariion’s predecessor, HADA (High Availability Disk Array) was developed in 1991 by Data General Corporation, one of the first minicomputer companies. HADA was designed to significantly improve the performance of commodity hard disk drives by running large numbers of them in parallel. It was one of the first products on the market with a cached RAID system, and featured hot-swapping and several other innovations.
Run-length limited
Early disk drives used very simple encoding schemes, such as RLL (0,1) FM code, followed by RLL (1,3) MFM code which were widely used in hard disk drives until the mid-1980s and are still used in digital optical discs such as CD, DVD, MD, Hi-MD and Blu-ray. Higher density RLL (2,7) and RLL (1,7) codes became the "de facto" industry standard for hard disks by the early 1990s.
History of the floppy disk
In 1967, IBM tasked their San Jose, California development laboratory to develop a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into their System/370 mainframes in a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL). The System/370 was IBM's first computer system family to make extensive usage of volatile read/write semiconductor memory for microcode, so for most models, whenever the power was turned on, the microcode had to be loaded (System/370's predecessor, System/360, generally used non-volatile read-only memory for microcode). IBM also wanted inexpensive media that could be sent out to customers with software updates.
Hard disk drive
The total capacity of HDDs is given by manufacturers using SI decimal prefixes such as gigabytes (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) and terabytes (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). This practice dates back to the early days of computing; by the 1970s, "million", "mega" and "M" were consistently used in the decimal sense for drive capacity. However, capacities of memory are quoted using a binary interpretation of the prefixes, i.e. using powers of 1024 instead of 1000.
History of hard disk drives
Also in 1973, Control Data Corporation introduced the first of its series of SMD disk drives using conventional disk pack technology. The SMD family became the predominant disk drive in the minicomputer market into the 1980s.
Hardcard
The Hardcard provided the computer industry with the first one-inch-thick HDD, but it was an interface and form factor only compatible with the full length card slot of the ISA bus first introduced with the IBM PC. As such it had a thicker head disk assembly than the subsequently introduced 1-inch high standard form factor 3½-inch HDDs.
Hard disk drive
NAND performance is improving faster than HDDs, and applications for HDDs are eroding. In 2018, the largest hard drive had a capacity of 15TB while the largest capacity SSD had a capacity of 30.72TB or 100TB and HDDs are not expected to reach 100TB capacities until somewhwere around 2025. Smaller form factors, 1.8-inches and below, were discontinued around 2010. The price of solid-state storage (NAND), represented by Moore's law, is improving faster than HDDs. NAND has a higher price elasticity of demand than HDDs, and this drives market growth. During the late 2000s and 2010s, the product life cycle of HDDs entered a mature phase, and slowing sales may indicate the onset of the declining phase.
Relatively new technologies like HDMR, HAMR and MAMR, Bit patterned media and dual independent actuator arms increase the speed and capacity of HDDs and are expected to make HDDs more competitive with SSDs.
Hard drive (disambiguation)
Hard disk drive is a computer storage device containing rigid rotating platters.
William Goddard (engineer)
William Goddard was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame with John Lynott in 2007 for their contribution to the invention of the first magnetic disk drive. It is hailed as one of the most significant inventions in the computer industry and it has since emerged to become an industry of its own with an annual revenue of $22 billion worldwide.
Optical disc drive
The CD-ROM format was developed by Sony and Denon, introduced in 1984, as an extension of Compact Disc Digital Audio and adapted to hold any form of digital data. The CD-ROM format has a storage capacity of 650 MB. Also in 1984, Sony introduced a LaserDisc data storage format, with a larger data capacity of 3.28 GB. The DVD format, developed by Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba, was released in 1995, and was capable of holding 4.7 GB per layer.
Advanced Format
Advanced Format is also considered a milestone technology in the history of HDD storage, where data has been generally processed in 512-byte segments since at least the introduction of consumer-grade HDDs in the early 1980s, and in similar or smaller chunks in the professional field since the invention of HDDs in 1956.
Spelling of disc
By the 20th century, the "k" spelling was more popular in the United States, while the "c" variant was preferred in the UK. In the 1950s, when the American company IBM pioneered the first hard disk drive storage devices, it used the "k" spelling. Consequently, in computer terminology today it is common for the "k" word to refer mainly to magnetic storage devices (particularly in British English, where the term "disk" is sometimes regarded as a contraction of "diskette", a much later word and actually a diminutive of "disk").
Microdrive
Prior to the 1-inch Microdrive, a 1.3-inch HDD was developed and launched in 1992 by HP with a capacity of 20 MB. These units weighed about 28 g (1 oz), with dimensions of 2.0" × 1.44" × 0.414" (50.8 mm × 36.5 mm × 10.5 mm) and were the physically smallest hard drives in the world before the Microdrive.
Hard disk recorder
Prior to the 1980s, most recording studios used analog multitrack recorders, typically based on reel-to-reel tape. The first commercial hard disk recording system was the Sample-to-Disk 16-bit, 50 kHz digital recording option for the New England Digital Synclavier II in 1982. The high cost and limited capacity of these solutions limited their use to large professional audio recording studios, and even then, they were usually reserved for specific applications such as film post-production. Stereo audio was not immediately available due to data input and output limitations on hard drives of that time.
M-Systems
M-Systems Ltd., (sometimes spelled msystems) was a Nasdaq-listed Israeli producer of flash memory storage products founded in 1989 by Dov Moran and based in Kfar Saba, Israel. They were best known for developing and patenting the first flash drive, marketed in 1995 as "DiskOnChip", and the first USB flash drive, marketed in 2000 as "DiskOnKey". They also created the patented True Flash Filing System (TrueFFS) which presented the flash memory as a disk drive to the computer. After 17 years of business, they were acquired by their prior competitor, SanDisk, in 2006.
The DiskOnChip (DOC) was developed at the R&D Center established by M-Systems called EUROM. Rick Iorillo, Rony Levy and David Deitcher were the individuals that worked on the development and marketing of the first 2 MB DOC. This product went on to receive the Most Innovative Award from EDN in 1995 and later went on to become the Flash Drive and DiskOnKey.
Information technology
IBM introduced the first hard disk drive in 1956, as a component of their 305 RAMAC computer system. Most digital data today is still stored magnetically on hard disks, or optically on media such as CD-ROMs. Until 2002 most information was stored on analog devices, but that year digital storage capacity exceeded analog for the first time. As of 2007 almost 94% of the data stored worldwide was held digitally: 52% on hard disks, 28% on optical devices and 11% on digital magnetic tape. It has been estimated that the worldwide capacity to store information on electronic devices grew from less than 3 exabytes in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007, doubling roughly every 3 years.
History of the floppy disk
In 1981, Sony introduced their -inch floppy disk cartridge (90.0 mm × 94.0 mm) having a single sided unformatted capacity of 218.8 KB and a formatted capacity of 161.2 KB. A double sided version was available in 1982. This initial Sony design was similar to other less than -inch designs but somewhat simpler in construction. The first computer to use this format was Sony's SMC 70 of 1982. Other than Hewlett-Packard's HP-150 of 1983 and Sony's MSX computers that year, this format suffered from a similar fate as the other new formats; the -inch format simply had too much market share.
Hard disk recorder
With the arrival of the compact disc in 1982, digital recording became a major area of development by equipment makers. Several affordable solutions were released during the late 1980s and early 90s; many of these continued to use tape, either in reels, or in more manageable videocassettes. In 1993, iZ Technology Corporation developed RADAR (Random Access Digital Audio Recorder distributed by Otari), designed to replace 24-track tape machines. By the mid-1990s, with the steady decline of hard disk prices and the corresponding increases in capacity and portability, the cost of hard disk recording systems had dropped to the point where they became affordable for even smaller studios. Hard disk systems have since become the preferred method for studio recording.
History of hard disk drives
The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. When hard drives became available for personal computers, they offered 5-megabyte capacity. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity of about 1 gigabyte. As of January 2019, desktop hard disk drives typically had a capacity of 1 to 6 terabytes, with the largest-capacity drives reaching 15 terabytes.
History of Digital Equipment Corporation
DEC's first internally developed HDD was the RS08, a 256 kWord fixed-head contact-start-stop drive using plated media; it shipped in 1969.
Network Direct Attached Storage
In 2001, Han-gyoo Kim of Korea and Zhe Khi Pak of Russia applied for a US patent on a "network-attached disk".
By 2002 the first NetDisk (up to 80 GB) was marketed as a low cost alternative to full computer based network storage options.
The Ximeta company was founded in 2003.
In 2004 Kim applied for a patent to allow multiple clients write access to the shared block storage device.
By 2006, sizes up to 500 GB were supported.
In 2008 an NDAS device called "ShareDisk Gigabit" created by Co-World Cs in Germany briefly claimed the title of world's fastest network storage device.
In 2011 IOCELL Networks announced ownership of the NDAS system and NetDisk patents.An open source management interface was made available for Linux in 2009.
History of hard disk drives
The IBM 350 Disk File was developed under the code-name RAMAC by an IBM San Jose team led by Reynold Johnson. It was announced in 1956 with the then new IBM 305 RAMAC computer. A variant, the IBM 355 Disk File, was simultaneously announced with the IBM RAM 650 computer, an enhancement to the IBM 650.
Shugart Associates
Shugart Associates (later Shugart Corporation) was a computer peripheral manufacturer that dominated the floppy disk drive market in the late 1970s and is famous for introducing the 5-inch minifloppy floppy disk drive. In 1979 it was one of the first companies to introduce a hard disk drive form factor compatible with a floppy disk drive, the SA1000 form factor compatible with the 8-inch FDD form factor.
Plus Development
Plus Development Corporation was a majority-owned subsidiary of Quantum Corporation and invented the Hardcard hard disk drive on a card which started a wave of companies producing similar products in the late 1980s.
Quantum Bigfoot
The Quantum Bigfoot brand was a series of hard disk drives produced by Quantum Corp. from 1996 through the late 1990s. The Bigfoot series was notable for deviating from the standard form factor for hard drives. While most desktop hard drives at that time used a 3.5-inch physical format, Quantum Bigfoot drives used a larger 5.25-inch form factor more commonly seen in older hard drives, CD-ROM and other optical disc drives. This form factor allowed Quantum to increase the capacity of their hard drives without an increase in data density, thus lowering costs compared to a 3.5-inch drive with the same capacity. It also allowed manufacturers and owners to install the hard drive above or below the optical drive in the computer, as the typical computer had multiple 5.25-inch bays.
Hal Prewitt
In the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the early creators of personal computer products, developing popular software and hardware while helping build a new industry. He provided consulting services to IBM and is credited with inventing hard disk drives and world's first local area network (LAN) for their first portable computer, the IBM 5100, and their first desktop computer the IBM 5120.
Hard Disk 20
The Macintosh Hard Disk 20 was the first hard drive developed by Apple Computer specifically for use with the Macintosh 512K. Introduced on September 17, 1985, it was part of Apple's long awaited solution toward completing the Macintosh Office (a suite of integrated business hardware & software) announced in January 1985. It would be over a year more before Apple would release the file server software AppleShare that would link all of the hardware together. By that time the SCSI interface introduced on the Macintosh Plus in January 1986, would accommodate far faster and more efficient hard drives, rendering the Hard Disk 20 virtually obsolete.
Seagate Technology
In 1996, Seagate introduced the industry's first hard disk with a 10,000-RPM spindle speed, the Cheetah 4LP. The product increased to a speed of 15,000-RPM by 2000 with the release of the Cheetah 15X. In May 1997, the High Court of Justice in England awarded Amstrad PLC $93 million in a lawsuit over reportedly faulty disk drives Seagate sold to Amstrad, a British manufacturer and marketer of personal computers. That year Seagate also introduced the first Fibre Channel interface hard drive.
History of the floppy disk
In 1984, IBM introduced the 5.25" high density disk format with its new IBM AT machines. The 5.25" HD drive was essentially a scaled-down 8" drive, using the same rotation speed and bit rate, and it provided almost three times as much storage as the 360k format, but had compatibility issues with the older drives due to the narrower read/write head.
Floppy disk
The first floppy disk was 8 inches in diameter, was protected by a flexible plastic jacket and was a read-only device used by IBM as a way of loading microcode. Read/write floppy disks and their drives became available in 1972 but it was IBM's 1973 introduction of the 3740 data entry system that began the establishment of floppy disks, called by IBM the "Diskette 1", as an industry standard for information interchange. Early microcomputers used for engineering, business, or word processing often used one or more 8-inch disk drives for removable storage; the CP/M operating system was developed for microcomputers with 8-inch drives.
Plus Development
Over the two years after Plus Development was launched, the team was working on some major industry firsts:Within one year of the Plus Development introduction of Hardcard, 28 companies had released similar products. At that time, all of the other products were using a standard hard drive with a 1.6 inch/40.6 mm height forcing the card to hang over the adjacent PC slot. The hard drive was located on the opposite side away from the connector sometimes enabling a short half-length expansion card to be installed in the adjacent slot. These hard drive cards were usually described as occupying 1.5 expansion slots.
Below are some of companies and product names with a similar product to the Plus Hardcard.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
The 9345 HDD first shipped in Nov 1990 as an RPQ on IBMs SCSE (SuperComputing Systems Extensions). Developed at IBM's San Jose, California laboratory under the code name Sawmill. It was an up to 1.5 GB full height 5¼-inch HDD using up to 8 130 mm disks. It was the first HDD to use MR (Magneto Resistive) heads.
Magneto-optical drive
A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon a magneto-optical disc. Both 130 mm (5.25 in) and 90 mm (3.5 in) form factors exist. In 1983, just a year after the introduction of the Compact Disc, Kees Schouhamer Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable magneto-optical Compact Discs during the 73rd AES 
Convention in Eindhoven. The technology was introduced commercially in 1985. Although optical, they appear as hard disk drives to the operating system and can be formatted with any file system. Magneto-optical drives were common in some countries, such as Japan because of the success of the Sony MiniDisc, but have fallen into disuse.
Areal density (computer storage)
Hard drives are often measured in terms of cost per bit. For example, the first commercial hard drive, IBM's RAMAC in 1957, supplied 3.75 MB for $34,500, or $9,200 per megabyte. In 1989, a 40 MB hard drive cost $1200, or $30/MB. And in 2018, 4 Tb drives sold for $75, or 1.9¢/GB, an improvement of 1.5 million since 1989 and 520 million since the RAMAC. This is without adjusting for inflation, which increased prices nine-fold from 1956 to 2018.
Macintosh External Disk Drive
By early 1985, it was clear that the Macintosh needed additional storage space, in particular a hard drive. Apple announced their first hard drive for the Mac in March 1985. However, the MFS file system did not support subdirectories, making it unsuitable for a hard disk. Apple quickly began adopting for the Mac the hierarchical based SOS filing system introduced with the Apple III and long since implemented in ProDOS for the Apple II series and the Lisa. This change in the Mac's filing system delayed the introduction of the double sided Sony drives which Apple intended to offer as soon as the technology was available, a concession they made when adopting the Sony drives over their own problematic double-capacity Twiggy drives. However, based on the success of the 3.5" floppy drive for the Mac, there was no such obstacle in immediately implementing an 800K drive for the Apple II, so it was introduced in September 1985, four months before the version for the Mac. While Apple simultaneously introduced their new hard drive after a 6-month delay, they chose not to implement the new floppy drive for the Macintosh at that time.
Disk storage
The first commercial digital disk storage device was the IBM 350 which shipped in 1956 as a part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computing system. The random-access, low-density storage of disks was developed to complement the already used sequential-access, high-density storage provided by tape drives using magnetic tape. Vigorous innovation in disk storage technology, coupled with less vigorous innovation in tape storage, has reduced the difference in acquisition cost per terabyte between disk storage and tape storage; however, the total cost of ownership of data on disk including power and management remains larger than that of tape.
HP Kittyhawk microdrive
It was the first ever commercially produced hard drive in a 1.3 inch form factor. The original implementation (model 3013) had the capacity of 20 MB. A 40 MB model called Kittyhawk II (model 3014) was eventually introduced, with the retail price of $499. Both models have IDE interfaces. It appears that some variations of the hard drive were produced with PC card interface as well. The drive measured 2.0" x 1.44" x 0.414" (50.8 mm x 36.5 mm x 10.5 mm), and weighed about 1 ounce (28 g). It was manufactured by Citizen Corporation, at the time a leader in small device manufacturing. The drive featured a number of unique technologies, including a built-in accelerometer that protected the hard drive from falls. Kittyhawk was claimed to be able to survive a 3-foot drop onto concrete while operating without loss of data.
Fdisk
IBM introduced fdisk, Fixed Disk Setup Program version 1.00, with the March 1983 release of the IBM PC/XT, the first PC to store data on a hard disk, and the IBM Personal Computer DOS version 2.0. Version 1 could be used to create one FAT12 DOS partition, delete it, change the active partition, or display partition data. fdisk writes the master boot record, which supported up to four partitions. The other three were intended for other operating systems such as CP/M-86 and Xenix, which were expected to have their own partitioning utilities as fdisk did not support them.
Run-length limited
The first "RLL" code used in hard drives was RLL (2,7), developed by IBM engineers and first used commercially in 1979 on the IBM 3370 DASD, for use with the 4300 series mainframe. During the late 1980s, PC hard disks began using RLL proper (i.e. variants more complex than those that had received their own proper names, such as MFM). RLL codes have found almost universal application in optical disc recording practice since 1980. In consumer electronics, RLLs like the EFM code (rate=8/17, d=2, k=10) are employed in the Compact Disc (CD) and MiniDisc (MD), and the EFMPlus code (rate=8/16, d=2, k=10) used in the DVD. Parameters d, k are the minimum and maximum allowed run-lengths. For more coverage on the storage technologies, the references cited in this article are useful.
Hard disk drive
Data is stored on a hard drive in a series of logical blocks. Each block is delimited by markers identifying its start and end, error detecting and correcting information, and space between blocks to allow for minor timing variations. These blocks often contained 512 bytes of usable data, but other sizes have been used. As drive density increased, an initiative known as Advanced Format extended the block size to 4096 bytes of usable data, with a resulting significant reduction in the amount of disk space used for block headers, error checking data, and spacing.
Binary prefix
One of the earliest hard disk drives in personal computing history,
the Seagate ST-412, was specified as "Formatted: 10.0 Megabytes". More precisely, the drive contains 4 heads or active surfaces (tracks per cylinder), 306 cylinders, and when formatted with a sector size of 256 bytes and 32 sectors/track results in a capacity of . This drive was one of several types installed into the IBM PC/XT and extensively advertised and reported as a "10 MB" (formatted) hard disk drive.
The factor of 306 cylinders (rather than 256 or 512, both of which are powers of two) in the calculation causes the capacity to be not conveniently close to a power of 1024; operating systems and programs using the customary binary prefixes show this as "9.5625 MB". Many later drives in the personal computer market used 17 sectors per track; still later, zone bit recording was introduced, causing the number of sectors per track to vary from the outer track to the inner. Nor are drives required to have a number of active surfaces that is a power of, or even divisible by, two; drives with e.g. three active surfaces are not uncommon. All of these factors reduce the utility of the customary binary prefixes for expressing drive capacity.
Perpendicular recording
Toshiba produced the first commercially available disk drive (1.8") using this technology in 2005. Shortly thereafter in January 2006, Seagate Technology began shipping its first laptop sized hard drive using perpendicular recording technology, the Seagate Momentus 5400.3. Seagate also announced at that time that the majority of its hard disk storage devices would utilize the new technology by the end of 2006.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
The 5444 was announced September 1969 as part of System/3. Developed at IBM's Hursley, England, laboratory under code name Dolphin it used the 5440 disk cartridge. The cartridge in turn contained one 14-inch disk. There were three models:The 62GV first shipped in May 1974. Developed at IBM's Hursley, England, laboratory under the code name Gulliver with an initial capacity of 5MB. Subsequent models have 10 MB (62TM) and 14 MB capacities. It used a rotary actuator with one 14-inch disk. Rotary actuator technology was invented in Hursley as part of the development of Gulliver. During its production life it shipped 177,000 units making it the first HDD known to have shipped in excess of 100,000 units.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
The 0671 first shipped in 1987. Developed under the code name "Lee" at IBM Rochester, MN, it was an up to 316 MB ESDI full height 5¼-inch HDD with up to 8 130 mm disks depending upon model. This was IBM's first usage of a thin metal film as the disk's recording surface. In 1988 it shipped as part of the 9404 System Unit of the IBM AS/400 system which contained two, or optionally three of these HDDs.
Micropolis (company)
Micropolis Corporation (styled as "MICROPΩLIS") was a disk drive company located in Chatsworth, California and founded in 1976. Micropolis initially manufactured high capacity (for the time) hard-sectored 5.25-inch floppy drives and controllers, later manufacturing hard drives using SCSI and ESDI interfaces. 
Micropolis's first advance was to take the existing 48 tpi (tracks per inch) standard created by Shugart Associates, and double both the track density and track recording density to get four times the total storage on a 5.25-inch floppy in the "MetaFloppy" series with quad density (Drives ":1054", ":1053", and ":1043") around 1980. Micropolis pioneered 100 tpi density because of the attraction of an exact 100 tracks to the inch. "Micropolis-compatible" 5.25-inch 77-track diskette drives were also manufactured by Tandon (TM100-3M and TM100-4M). Such drives were used in a number of computers like in a Vector Graphic S-100 bus computer, the Durango F-85 and in a few Commodore disk drives (8050, 8250, 8250LP and SFD-1001).
Western Digital Raptor
The Western Digital Raptor (often marketed as WD Raptor or VelociRaptor) is a series of high performance hard disk drives produced by Western Digital first marketed in 2003. The drive occupies a niche in the enthusiast, workstation and small-server market. Traditionally, the majority of servers used hard drives featuring a SCSI interface because of their advantages in both performance and reliability over consumer-level ATA drives.
Sportech
Sportech began as a small electronics company, Rodime PLC, based in Scotland in 1979. By 1986, it was listed on the London Stock Exchange. The company specialized in manufacturing hard disks, inventing the 3.5-inch hard drive in early 1985,
but soon became unprofitable due to delays in getting the product to market. By 1991, Rodime ceased manufacturing hard disks. By early 2000, Rodime was a shell company with a $34 million overdraft and four employees, primarily in the business of suing other hard drive vendors for patent infringements related to Rodime's 3.5-inch drive development work. 
The company negotiated patent-licensing settlements with Seagate Technology, Conner Peripherals,
and IBM.
USB flash drive
A USB flash drive, also known as a thumb drive, pen drive, gig stick, flash stick, jump drive, disk key, disk on key (after the original M-Systems DiskOnKey drive from 2000), flash-drive, memory stick (not to be confused with the Sony Memory Stick), USB key, USB stick or USB memory, is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. It is typically removable, rewritable and much smaller than an optical disc. Most weigh less than . Since first appearing on the market in late 2000, as with virtually all other computer memory devices, storage capacities have risen while prices have dropped. , flash drives with anywhere from 8 to 256 GB were frequently sold, while 512 GB and 1 TB units were less frequent. As of 2018, 2TB flash drives were the largest available in terms of storage capacity. Some allow up to 100,000 write/erase cycles, depending on the exact type of memory chip used, and are thought to last between 10 and 100 years under normal circumstances (shelf storage time).
Drum memory
A drum memory contained a large metal cylinder, coated on the outside surface with a ferromagnetic recording material. It could be considered the precursor to the hard disk drive (HDD), but in the form of a drum rather than a flat disk. In most designs, one or more rows of fixed read-write heads ran along the long axis of the drum, one for each track. The drum's controller simply selected the proper head and waited for the data to appear under it as the drum turned (rotational latency). Not all drum units were designed with each track having its own head. Some, such as the English Electric DEUCE drum and the Univac FASTRAND had multiple heads moving a short distance on the drum in contrast to modern HDDs, which have one head per platter surface.
History of hard disk drives
Smaller diameter media came into usage during the 1970s and by the end of the decade standard form factors had been established for drives using nominally 8-inch media (e.g., Shugart SA1000) and nominally 5.25-inch media (e.g., Seagate ST-506).
Nanoionic device
In 1976 the first Solid State Device or SSD was made by Dataram and could store up to 2 MB. The SSD did not become popular until 2001 when SSD the SSD industry its revenues reached $25 million a year and was listed on INC 500 fastest growing private companies. The reason for this slow growth was that SSD were expensive. In 1978 1 GB would have cost $1 million. Even in 2001, Adtron’s S35PC 3.5” SSD drive which had 14 GB storage cost $42,000.
Hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electromechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information using one or more rigid rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data even when powered off.
Gigabyte
Since the first disk drive, the IBM 350, disk drive manufacturers expressed hard drive capacities using decimal prefixes. With the advent of gigabyte-range drive capacities, manufacturers based most consumer hard drive capacities in certain size classes expressed in decimal gigabytes, such as "500 GB". The exact capacity of a given drive model is usually slightly larger than the class designation. Practically all manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices continue to define one gigabyte as , which is displayed on the packaging. Some operating systems such as OS X express hard drive capacity or file size using decimal multipliers, while others such as Microsoft Windows report size using binary multipliers. This discrepancy causes confusion, as a disk with an advertised capacity of, for example, (meaning ) might be reported by the operating system as , meaning 372 GiB.
List of disk drive form factors
IBM's first hard drive, the IBM 350, used a stack of fifty 24-inch platters and was of a size comparable to two large refrigerators. In 1962, IBM introduced its model 1311 disk, which used six 14-inch (nominal size) platters in a removable pack and was roughly the size of a washing machine. This became a standard platter size and drive form-factor for many years, used also by other manufacturers. The IBM 2314 used platters of the same size in an eleven-high pack and introduced the "drive in a drawer" layout, although the "drawer" was not the complete drive.
Hardcard
Plus Development, a subsidiary of Quantum Corporation, developed the first ISA Hardcard, and released it in October 1985. By June 1986, 28 of Plus Development's competitors were producing similar products. The term has been used generically to refer to any hard disk on a card.
Nanoionic device
Traditional hard drives run on mechanical parts, which uses the permanent disk to store your personal data. The hard disk drives usually have a 10 centimeter diameter and are a centimeter thick. These drives use a magnetic recording technique. We, as users, can easily manipulate our data on this medium i.e. add, copy, cut or paste data on it though this technique. The principle of magnetic flux is used for such processes. Basically the hard drive remembers which data is where and how to manipulate the data according to the user’s preference by remembering the flux patterns.
The average hard drives contain the specific parts:
Optical disc drive
When the optical disc drive was first developed, it was not easy to add to computer systems. Some computers such as the IBM PS/2 were standardizing on the 3.5" floppy and 3.5" hard disk, and did not include a place for a large internal device. Also IBM PCs and clones at first only included a single (parallel) ATA drive interface, which by the time the CDROM was introduced, was already being used to support two hard drives. Early laptops simply had no built-in high-speed interface for supporting an external storage device.
Quantum Corporation
Early on, the company designed smaller ST-506-compatible versions of its hard drives, the "Q500" series, using the same servo system. In 1985, it introduced the Plus Hardcard, which was essentially a smaller version of the Q500, designed to fit in an ISA slot. In 1986, Quantum entered the then-new SCSI market with the Q280 80MB drive, which was one of the first mass-market drives to use embedded servo. Later on, Quantum combined the Q280's embedded controller design with the servo hardware from the Q500 series, and developed the "ProDrive" range, which was also its first drive family to support the ATA interface.
History of science and technology in Japan
In 1990, Toshiba's MK1122FC was the first hard disk drive to use a glass hard disk drive platter, replacing the earlier aluminium platters. Glass platters had several advantages, such as greater shock resistance, compared to aluminium platter.The Toshiba Toscal BC-1411 electronic calculator, which debuted in 1965, introduced an early form of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) built from discrete components.
Silicon Glen
Rodime of Glenrothes pioneered the 3.5 inch hard disk drive in 1983 and spent subsequent years defending its patents against (and collecting royalties from) Seagate, Quantum, IBM and others.
History of hard disk drives
Most hard disk drives in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users by systems integrators such as the Corvus Disk System or the systems manufacturer such as the Apple ProFile. The IBM PC XT in 1983, included an internal standard 10MB hard disk drive, and soon thereafter internal hard disk drives proliferated on personal computers.
Macintosh External Disk Drive
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original of a series of external -inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple would unify their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard " flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new " rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external " drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the "Apple UniDisk 3.5".
HyperOs HyperDrive
HyperDrive (HD) is a series of RAM-based solid-state drives invented by Accelerated Logic B.V. (became Accelerated Logic ltd., and is now a German company) employee Pascal Bancsi (for HyperDrive II architecture), who partnered with the British company HyperOs Systems, who manufactured the retail product. The HyperDrive interfaces with and is recognized by computer systems as a standard hard drive.
Tandon Corporation
In 1979, Tandon introduced the TM-100 diskette drive, a 5.25" unit with 40 track support as opposed to the Shugart SA-400's 35 tracks. When Tandy introduced the TRS-80 Model III in 1980, they equipped the computer with TM-100s. The following year, Tandon obtained an even more lucrative contract when IBM released its Personal Computer. Until 1985, Tandon were the sole supplier of floppy drives for IBM PCs, initially the same single-sided unit used in the TRS-80, then the newer double-sided TM-100-2. Tandon would become the world's largest independent producer of disk drives for personal computers and word processors. In the mid-1980s, Tandon introduced a line of hard disk drives, making several models of the same basic design with a P shaped top cover and a pinion rack stepper motor off to the side. They also introduced portable hard disk drives that could be easily removed from personal computers. A major decline in North American computer sales during 1984–85 as well as competition from Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers proved difficult for the company. Tandon sold its original data-storage business to Western Digital for nearly $80 million in 1988, and brought in former IBM and other computer industry executives in an attempt to remake the company as a leading producer of personal computers. By 1989, nearly all (90 percent) of its personal computer sales were in Europe, and its stock price had fallen from a 1983 peak of $34.25 to $0.50.
Hard disk drive
Also, in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, which was about the size of a washing machine and stored two million characters on a removable disk pack. Users could buy additional packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape. Later models of removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became the norm in most computer installations and reached capacities of 300 megabytes by the early 1980s. Non-removable HDDs were called "fixed disk" drives.
Happy drives
This was the first product released in 1982. The customer sent in either their 810 drive or the internal sideboard, and the upgrade was wired in. This consisted of a few extra logic chips, a different eprom and point to point wiring.
In addition to the buffered reading and writing with zero latency and faster serial i/o, it made backups of floppies.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
The 0681 first shipped in April 1990. Developed at IBM's Hursley, UK, laboratory under the code name Redwing. It was an up to 857 MB full height 5¼-inch HDD using up to 12 130 mm disks. It was the first HDD to use PRML decoding of data. It was the drive component of the 9333 Disk Drive Subsystem which first shipped in early 1992.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
IBM introduced the IBM 3370 Direct Access Storage Device in January 1979 for IBM 4331, 4341, and System/38 midrange computers. It has seven fixed disks, and each unit has a capacity of 571 MB. It was the first HDD to use thin film head technology; research on that technology started at Thomas J. Watson Research Center in the late 1960s. The 3370 was a fixed block architecture device, used on DOS/VSE and VM, the only S/370 operating systems that supported FBA devices.
Binary prefix
By the mid-1970s it was common to see K meaning 1024 and the occasional M meaning for words or bytes of main memory (RAM) while K and M were commonly used with their decimal meaning for disk storage. In the 1980s, as capacities of both types of devices increased, the SI prefix G, with SI meaning, was commonly applied to disk storage, while M in its binary meaning, became common for computer memory. In the 1990s, the prefix G, in its binary meaning, became commonly used for computer memory capacity. The first terabyte (SI prefix, bytes) hard disk drive was introduced in 2007.
Nanoionic device
Nanoionic hard drives use nanoionic technology allowing for smaller devices while doing away with moving parts and the mechanical failures which are associated with previous HDD drives. Nanoionic hard drives are currently the most state of the art drives on the market and nanoionics was not utilized in hard drives until February 2014. Nanoionic devices were first proposed in 1992: "The results obtained show that it is possible to form arrays of electrochemical devices with single elements ~10 nm in size in the films". The basis of design of nanoionic devices is the creation of nanostructures with nanoionic parameter "λ" / "L" ~ 1, where "L" is the size of device structure, and "λ" is the characteristic size of specific region where the property of fast ionic transport is realized. “Possibilities to influence on these specific regions < λ > in a controllable manner may appear in short sized devices”. Ion - electronic hybrid devices should be considered as a step on a way to the future nanoelectronics-nanoionics (nanoelionics) that was first proposed in 1996.
Hard disk drive failure
"Load/unload" technology relies on the heads being lifted off the platters into a safe location, thus eliminating the risks of wear and stiction altogether. The first HDD RAMAC and most early disk drives used complex mechanisms to load and unload the heads. Modern HDDs use ramp loading, first introduced by Memorex in 1967, to load/unload onto plastic "ramps" near the outer disk edge.
Microdrive
In 2003-07-16, a Chinese manufacturer called GS Magicstor, Inc. (subsidiary of GS Magic, Inc.) announced it had produced 1-inch hard disk drive with capacity of 2.4GB at the beginning of the year 2003, originally marketed as an alternative to Microdrive by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. It was to be followed by 2.2 and 4.8GB 1-inch HDD that was unveiled in 2004 International CES, with 0.8-inch HDD. In 2004-12-28, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced it had filed lawsuit against GS Magicstor, Inc., GS Magic, Inc., and Riospring, Inc. for infringement of multiple Hitachi GST's patents relating to hard disk drives, after GS Magic Inc. had started promoting mini-HDD (small form factor hard disk drive).
SuperDrive
Introduced in 1988 under the Trademark name "FDHD" (Floppy Disk High Density), the subsequently renamed SuperDrive was known primarily as an internally mounted floppy drive that was part of the Macintosh computer; however, an external version of the drive was manufactured that came in a Snow White-styled plastic case.
History of hard disk drives
The RAMAC disk drive created a new level in the computer data hierarchy, today known as secondary storage, less expensive and slower than main memory (then typically core or drum) but faster and more expensive than tape drives. Subsequently there was a period of about 20 years in which other technologies competed with disks in the secondary storage marketplace, for example tape strips, e.g., NCR CRAM, tape cartridges, e.g., IBM 3850, and drums, e.g., Burroughs B430, UNIVAC FASTRAND, but all ultimately were displaced by HDDs. Today SSDs compete with HDDs in the marketplace.
Caddy (hardware)
Caddies date at least to the Capacitance Electronic Disc, which used a caddy from 1976 to protect the grooves of the disc.
Some early CD-ROM drives used a mechanism where CDs had to be inserted into special cartridges or caddies, somewhat similar in appearance to a jewel case. Although the idea behind this—a tougher plastic shell to protect the disc from damage—was sound, it did not gain wide acceptance among disc manufacturers. Drives that used the caddy format required "bare" discs to be placed into a caddy before use, making them less convenient to use. Drives that worked this way were referred to as "caddy drives" or "caddy load(ing)", but from about 1994 most computer manufacturers moved to tray-loading, or slot-loading drives.
Disk formatting
Modern hard disk drives, such as Serial attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives, appear at their interfaces as a contiguous set of fixed-size blocks; for many years 512 bytes long but beginning in 2009 and accelerating through 2011, all major hard disk drive manufacturers began releasing hard disk drive platforms using the Advanced Format of 4096 byte logical blocks.
History of general-purpose CPUs
By the end of the 1950s, commercial builders had developed factory-constructed, truck-deliverable computers. The most widely installed computer was the IBM 650, which used drum memory onto which programs were loaded using either paper punched tape or punched cards. Some very high-end machines also included core memory which provided higher speeds. Hard disks were also starting to grow popular.
History of computing hardware
Magnetic drum memories were developed for the US Navy during WW II with the work continuing at Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in 1946 and 1947. ERA, then a part of Univac included a drum memory in its 1103, announced in February 1953. The first mass-produced computer, the IBM 650, also announced in 1953 had about 8.5 kilobytes of drum memory.
History of hard disk drives
Unit production peaked in 2010 at about 650 million units and has been in a slow decline since then.
Seagate Technology
Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506, in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Today Seagate, along with its competitor Western Digital, dominates the HDD market. Much of their growth has come through their acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation's Imprimis division, the makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006 and Samsung's HDD business in 2011.
Microdrive
In 2004, Seagate launched 2.5 and 5 GB hard disk drives in the same small physical form-factor as IBM Microdrive, and referred to them as either 1-inch hard drives or CompactFlash hard drives due to the trademark issue. These drives were also commonly known as the Seagate ST1. In 2005 Seagate launched an 8 GB model. Seagate also sold a standalone consumer product based on these drives with a product known as the Pocket Hard Drive. These devices came in the shape of a hockey puck with an integrated USB 2.0 cable.
History of the floppy disk
In a 1976 meeting, An Wang of Wang Laboratories informed Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro of Shugart Associates that the 8-inch format was simply too large and expensive for the desktop word processing machines he was developing at the time. He argued for a $100 drive.
History of the floppy disk
When the first microcomputers were being developed in the 1970s, the 8-inch floppy found a place on them as one of the few "high speed, mass storage" devices that were even remotely affordable to the target market (individuals and small businesses). The first microcomputer operating system, CP/M, originally shipped on 8-inch disks. However, the drives were still expensive, typically costing more than the computer they were attached to in early days, so most machines of the era used cassette tape instead.
RAM drive
The Silicon Disk was launched in 1980, initially for the CP/M operating system and later for MS-DOS. Due to the limitations in memory addressing on Apple II series and Commodore computers, a RAM drive was also a popular application on Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 systems with RAM Expansion Units and on Apple II series computers with more than 64kB of RAM. Apple Computer supported a software RAM drive natively in ProDOS: on systems with 128kB or more of RAM, ProDOS would automatically allocate a RAM drive named /RAM.
History of the floppy disk
Like the -inch, the -inch disk underwent an evolution of its own. When Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, it used single-sided -inch disk drives with an advertised capacity of 400 kB. The encoding technique used by these drives was known as GCR, or Group Coded Recording (similar recording methods were used by Commodore on its -inch drives and Sirius Systems Technology in its Victor 9000 non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine). 
Somewhat later, PC-compatible machines began using single-sided -inch disks with an advertised capacity of 360 kB (the same as a double-sided -inch disk), and a different, incompatible recording format called MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation). GCR and MFM drives (and their formatted disks) were incompatible, although the physical disks were the same. In 1986, Apple introduced double-sided, 800 kB disks, still using GCR, and soon after, IBM began using 720 kB double-sided double-density MFM disks in PCs like the IBM PC Convertible. IBM PC compatibles adopted it too, while the Amiga used MFM encoding on the same disks to give a capacity of 1 MB (880 KB available once formatted).
PrairieTek
Its PrairieTek 220 was the first hard drive, a potentially profitable move, but by the time the drive entered into mass production, its storage capacity was already low for the market. "PrairieTek's single disk 40MB model, potentially a
cost-effective competitive product, was...late to market."
Floppy disk
The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and then were sold separately beginning in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term "floppy disk" appeared in print as early as 1970, and although IBM announced its first media as the "Type 1 Diskette" in 1973, the industry continued to use the terms "floppy disk" or "floppy".
Macintosh External Disk Drive
Later renamed the Apple SuperDrive (G7287), the Apple FDHD Drive (Floppy Disk High Density) was introduced in 1989 as Apple's first external 1.44 MB high-density double-sided -inch floppy drive. It supported all of Apple's 3.5" floppy disk formats as well as all standard PC formats (e.g. MS-DOS, Windows), allowing the Macintosh to read and write all industry standard floppy disk formats. The external drive was offered only briefly with support for the Apple II, coming late in that product's life. To take advantage of the drive's extended storage and new capabilities, it required the new SWIM (Sander-Wozniak Integrated Machine) floppy disk controller chip to be present on the Macintosh and Apple II, the latter requiring the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card which integrated the chip. If the drive was connected to an older Macintosh, Apple IIGS or Apple IIc Plus with the older IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) chip, the drive would act as a standard 800K drive, without any additional capabilities. The interface card was necessary for the Apple IIGS to make use of its greater storage capacity and ability to handle PC formats. The Apple IIe could not utilize the drive in any form, unless it had the specialized interface card installed, much like the UniDisk 3.5 which the SuperDrive replaced. The last Mac it could be used with was the Classic II and was discontinued shortly thereafter. The drive was fitted in every desktop Mac from its introduction and was eliminated with the introduction of the iMac in 1998. PowerPC Macs dropped the original auto-eject Sony drives and went to a manual eject mechanism.
History of IBM magnetic disk drives
The IBM 350 disk storage unit, the first disk drive, was announced by IBM as a component of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system on September 14, 1956. Simultaneously a very similar product, the IBM 355, was announced for the IBM 650 RAMAC computer system. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control." The first engineering prototype 350 disk storage shipped to Zellerbach Paper Company, San Francisco CA, in June 1956, with production shipment beginning in November 1957 with the shipment of a unit to United Airlines in Denver CO.
Hitachi-LG Data Storage
Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS or HL-DT-ST), a joint venture between Hitachi and LG, is a manufacturer of DVD and Blu-ray optical disk drives for desktop and notebook computers. Founded in late 2000, the company began operation in January 2001, and shipped its first product in the summer of that year. In 2006, HLDS began developing Blu-ray Disc drives. The company claims that it has led the disk drive industry in market share since its founding, with a 20% share for fiscal year 2001, and 29% for fiscal year 2012.
History of hard disk drives
The commercial usage of hard disk drives (HDD) began in 1957, with the shipment of a production IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model 350 disk storage. US Patent 3,503,060 issued March 24, 1970, and arising from the IBM RAMAC program is generally considered to be the fundamental patent for disk drives.
History of hard disk drives
Each generation of disk drives replaced larger, more sensitive and more cumbersome devices. The earliest drives were usable only in the protected environment of a data center. Later generations progressively reached factories, offices and homes, eventually becoming ubiquitous.