Who developed the first hard drive?
Hard disk drive
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.
M-Systems
The software that made the computer see the Flash memory as a disk drive was called TrueFFS and it was awarded US patent No. 5404485 in 1995. This software and initially the Flash memory from Toshiba were combined to form the first solid state storage product called DiskOnChip. The DiskOnChip was first designed for the Single Board Computer manufacturers and was a 2 MB chip. The DiskOnChip was made to work with TFFS and was able to bypass the BIOS by disabling the F000 address in the advance CMOS setup. Rick Iorillo lead the development and design efforts in the U.S. and established the first distributor base for the sale of the 28 pin DIP with Ampro being the first customer in the U.S. Sales of the DOC were established with IBM and Brazil to help in capturing the data off the public transportation systems.
IBM 5120
IBM did not offer a LAN or hard disk drive for these systems. However, in 1981 Hal Prewitt, founder of Core International, Inc invented and marketed the world's first and only hard disk subsystems and "CoreNet", a LAN used to share programs and data for the IBM 5110 and 5120 systems. In 1984, Core introduced PC51, software that allowed 5100 Series computer programs written in BASIC to run unmodified on the IBM PC and compatibles under PC DOS and share programs and data on CoreNet, the LAN for all these models.
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.
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.
History of the floppy disk
IBM Direct Access Storage Product Manager, Alan Shugart, assigned the job to David L. Noble, who tried to develop a new-style tape for the purpose, but without success. The project was reassigned to Donald L. Wartner, 23FD Disk Drive manager, and Herbert E. Thompson, 23FD Disk manager, along with design engineers Warren L. Dalziel, Jay Brent Nilson, and Ralph Flores; and that team developed the IBM 23FD Floppy Disk Drive System (code name Minnow). The disk is a read-only, flexible diskette called the "memory disk" and holding 80 kilobytes of data. Initially the disk was bare, but dirt became a serious problem so they enclosed it in a plastic envelope lined with fabric that would remove dust particles. The Floppy Disk Patent #3,668,658 was issued on June 6, 1972 with named inventors Ralph Flores and Herbert E. Thompson. The Floppy Disk Drive Patent #3,678,481 was issued July 18, 1972 with named inventors Warren L. Dalziel, Jay. B. Nilson, and Donald L. Wartner. IBM introduced the diskette commercially in 1971.
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.
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.
Jack Harker
John Mason "Jack" Harker (June 29, 1926 – April 27, 2013) was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and product and program manager who pioneered development of disk storage systems. Starting as a member of the original team that developed the first disk storage system, he went on to develop IBM Direct Access Storage products for the next 35 years. Over that time, Harker was twice director of the IBM San Jose Storage Laboratories, an IBM Fellow, and a IEEE Fellow. He retired from IBM in 1987 and died in 2013.
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.
Apple ProFile
The ProFile was the first hard disk drive produced by Apple Computer, initially for use with the Apple III personal computer. The original model had a formatted capacity of 5 MB and connected to a special interface card that plugged into an Apple III slot. In 1983, Apple offered a ProFile interface card for the Apple II, with software support for Apple ProDOS and Apple Pascal.
History of hard disk drives
HDDs continued to get smaller with the introduction of the 3.5-inch form factor in the middle of the decade Rodime 1983 and the 2.5-inch form factor PrairieTek 1988.
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).
Eagle Computer
The 1600 line were also the first computers with MS-DOS to have hard disks. Eagle achieved this by using the same hard-disk subsystem (Xebec hard-disk controller card, Eagle SASI card, and hard disk) as in the CP/M models. Subdirectories were not yet supported in the MS-DOS version that the Eagles used, just as in CP/M. MS-DOS did not offer CP/M's 16 numbered "user zones" either, which somewhat limited the usefulness of the hard disks.
SyQuest Technology
SyQuest Technology, Inc. () was an early entrant into the hard disk drive market for personal computers. The company was started in 1982, by Syed Iftikar who had been a founder of Seagate. Its earliest products were the SQ306R, a 5 MB 3.9" (100 mm) cartridge disk drive and associated Q-Pak cartridge for IBM XT compatibles. Subsequently a non-removable medium version was announced, the SQ306F.
For many years SyQuest was the most popular means of transferring large desktop publisher documents such as advertisements to professional printers. SyQuest marketed its products as able to give personal computer users "endless" hard drive space for data-intensive applications like desktop publishing, Internet information management, pre-press, multimedia, audio, video, digital photography, fast backup, data exchange and archiving, along with confidential data security and easy portability for the road.
Hard disk drive interface
The earliest hard disk drive (HDD) interfaces were "bit serial data interfaces" that connected an HDD to a controller with two cables, one for control and one for data. An additional cable was used for power, initially frequently AC but later usually connected directly to a DC power supply unit. The controller provided significant functions such as serial/parallel conversion, data separation, and track formatting, and required matching to the drive (after formatting) in order to assure reliability. Each control cable could serve two or more drives, while a dedicated (and smaller) data cable served each drive.
Hard drive (disambiguation)
Hard disk drive is a computer storage device containing rigid rotating platters.
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.
Ohio Scientific
The Challenger III, introduced in August 1977, had a maximum of 53KB of static RAM and used 8" 370k byte floppy disks in its dual floppy drive system. It was also sold in an optional 4' high 19" rack mount cabinet with wheels, version C3-B, that included a hard drive. (Ohio was the first company to use a Winchester hard drive in its PCs.) This was intended for an office environment and used a standard computer terminal, like the Hazeltine 1420 (or 1500), which was optionally supplied through factory sales. The terminals were the same ones as used with mainframe computers of that era. With the largest hard drive available, 74MB, the system cost just under $13,000. The least expensive version without the rack or hard drive was $3995 MSRP, a phenomenal performance-to-cost ratio for the time. The Challenger III also had the capability to support non-floppy or hard drive Challenger 2P computers through a simple network using RS-232 links.
Conner Peripherals
Conner Peripherals (commonly referred to as Conner) was a company that manufactured hard drives for personal computers. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by Seagate Technology co-founder and San Jose State University alumnus (1943– ). In 1986, they merged with CoData, a Colorado start-up founded by MiniScribe founders Terry Johnson and John Squires. CoData was developing a new type of small hard disk that put the capacity of a 5.25-inch drive into the smaller (and now commonplace) 3.5-inch format. The CoData drive was the first Conner Peripherals product. The company was partially financed by Compaq, who was also a major customer for many years.
History of hard disk drives
Also in 1961, Bryant Computer Products introduced its 4000 series disk drives. These massive units stood tall, wide, and had up to 26 platters, each in diameter, rotating at up to 1,200 rpm. Access times were from 50 to 205 milliseconds (ms). The drive's total capacity, depending on the number of platters installed, was up to 205,377,600 bytes (205 MB).
Hardware-based full disk encryption
Hardware-based full disk encryption (FDE) is available from many hard disk drive (HDD) vendors, including: iStorage Limited, Seagate Technology, Hitachi, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba and also solid-state drive vendors such as OCZ, SanDisk, Samsung, Micron and Integral Memory. The symmetric encryption key is maintained independently from the CPU, thus removing computer memory as a potential attack vector. In relation to hard disk drives, the term Self-encrypting drive (SED) is in more common usage.
Hierarchical File System
HFS was introduced by Apple in September 1985, specifically to support Apple's first hard disk drive for the Macintosh, replacing the Macintosh File System (MFS), the original file system which had been introduced over a year and a half earlier with the first Macintosh computer. HFS drew heavily upon Apple's first hierarchical SOS operating system for the failed Apple III, which also served as the basis for hierarchical filing systems on the Apple IIe and Apple Lisa. HFS was developed by Patrick Dirks and Bill Bruffey. It shared a number of design features with MFS that were not available in other file systems of the time (such as DOS's FAT). Files could have multiple forks (normally a data and a resource fork), which allowed the main data of the file to be stored separately from resources such as icons that might need to be localized. Files were referenced with unique file IDs rather than file names, and file names could be 255 characters long (although the Finder only supported a maximum of 31 characters).
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.
USB flash drive
M-Systems, an Israeli company, were granted a US patent on November 14, 2000, titled "Architecture for a [USB]-based Flash Disk", and crediting the invention to Amir Ban, Dov Moran and Oron Ogdan, all M-Systems employees at the time. The patent application was filed by M-Systems in April 1999. Later in 1999, IBM filed an invention disclosure by one of its employees. Flash drives were sold initially by Trek 2000 International, a company in Singapore, which began selling in early 2000. IBM became the first to sell USB flash drives in the United States in 2000. The initial storage capacity of a flash drive was 8 MB. Another version of the flash drive, described as a pen drive, was also developed. Pua Khein-Seng from Malaysia has been credited with this invention. Patent disputes have arisen over the years, with competing companies including Singaporean company Trek Technology and Chinese company Netac Technology, attempting to enforce their patents. Trek won a suit in Singapore, but has lost battles in other countries. Netac Technology has brought lawsuits against PNY Technologies, Lenovo, aigo, Sony, and Taiwan's Acer and Tai Guen Enterprise Co.
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.
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.
LenovoEMC
Iomega started business in Roy, Utah in 1980 (the firm moved its headquarters to San Diego in 2001). For many years, the firm was a significant name in the data storage industry. Iomega's most famous product, the Zip Drive, was revolutionary as it offered relatively large amounts of storage on easily portable compact cartridges. The original Zip disk's 100MB capacity was a huge improvement over the 1.44MB limitation of floppy disks. The Zip Drive became a common internal and external peripheral for IBM-compatible computers and Macs. However, Zip disk cartridges sometimes failed after a short period, (commonly referred to as the "click of death"). This problem, combined with competition from CD-RW drives, caused Zip Drive sales to decline dramatically, despite later efforts to introduce larger 250MB and 750MB disk versions. Iomega eventually launched a CD-RW drive.
Compact disc
American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital information on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russell's patent application was first filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's patents (then held by a Canadian company, Optical Recording Corp.) in the 1980s.
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.
Floppy disk
In 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the -inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs. There were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM, MFM and GCR. The -inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, and the hard-sectored disk format disappeared. The most common capacity of the -inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 KB. In 1984 IBM introduced with its PC-AT model the 1.2 MB dual-sided floppy disk, but it never became very popular. IBM started using the 720 KB double-density -inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and the 1.44 MB high-density version with the PS/2 line in 1987. These disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB "DSED" diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models, but this was a commercial failure.
Disk II
Apple did not originally offer a disk drive for the Apple II, which used data cassette storage like other microcomputers of the time. Apple founder and executive Mike Markkula asked cofounder Steve Wozniak to design a drive system for the computer after finding that a checkbook-balancing program Markkula had written took too long to load from tape. Wozniak knew nothing about disk controllers, but while at Hewlett-Packard had designed a simple, five-chip circuit to operate a Shugart Associates drive.
Hard disk drive
Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs became the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers by the early 1960s. Continuously improved, HDDs have maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers. More than 200 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly, sales revenues and unit shipments are declining because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability, and much lower latency and access times.
Toshiba T1000LE
The Toshiba T1000LE was one of the first laptops to include both a hard drive and a Ni-CD battery. Previous laptops did not have enough power to run a hard drive from battery power (exceptions include the Toshiba T1200, which had a proprietary 26-pin JVC hard drive, and the Macintosh Portable, which used a lead-acid battery, instead of a Ni-CD).
Alan Shugart
He began his career in 1951 as a field engineer at IBM. In 1955 he transferred to the IBM San Jose laboratory where he worked on the IBM 305 RAMAC. He rose through a series of increasingly important positions to become the Direct Access Storage Product Manager, responsible for disk storage products, IBM's most profitable businesses at that time. Among the groups reporting to Shugart was the team that invented the floppy disk.
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.
Hardcard
While sources inside the company during the launch of Hardcard claim it was the first HDD controller integrated into the drive printed circuit board, Xebec, a HDD controller manufacturer in the early 1980s, had already done that with their Owl product around August 1984. It was a complete 5.25 inch half-height HDD with an integrated controller and drive electronics on the same printed circuit board with a SASI interface.
Dell EMC
EMC, founded in 1979 by Richard Egan, Roger Marino & John Curly (the E, M & C in EMC), introduced its first 64-kilobyte (65,536 bytes) memory boards for the Prime Computer in 1981 and continued with the development of memory boards for other computer types. In the mid-1980s the company expanded beyond memory to other computer data storage types and networked storage platforms. EMC began shipping its flagship product, the Symmetrix, in 1990. Symmetrix was the main reason for EMC's rapid growth in the 1990s, both in size and value, from a company valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars to a multi-billion dollar company.
Western Digital
On January 27, 2009, Western Digital shipped the first 2 TB internal hard disk drive. On March 30, 2009, they entered the solid-state drive market with the acquisition of Siliconsystems, Inc. On July 27, 2009, Western Digital announced the first 1 TB mobile hard disk drive, which shipped as both a Passport series portable USB drive as well as a Scorpio Blue series notebook drive.
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
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".
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.
Conner Peripherals
Conner Peripherals were also one of the first companies to produce IDE specification AV (audio/visual) hard drives for a low cost, such as the 420 megabyte AV in 1995-1996, and was the first to produce drives with a native (no external adapter) IEEE 1394 Firewire interface.
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.
History of hard disk drives
The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit, announced in 1961, introduced the usage of heads having self-acting air bearings (self-flying heads) with one head per each surface of the disks.
Solid-state drive
In 1991, SanDisk Corporation (then SunDisk) shipped the first SSD, a 20 MB solid state drive (SSD) which sold OEM for around $1,000. It was used by IBM in a ThinkPad laptop In 1995, STEC, Inc. entered the flash memory business for consumer electronic devices.
Insight Enterprises
Hard Drives International was founded in 1988 by Eric and Tim Crown. Initially a mail order business selling computer storage, the company expanded into a storefront when credit card companies wouldn't service startup mail order firms. In 1991, the company changed its name to Insight Enterprises, and distribution included a full line of computers and accessories. The company held its initial public offering in January 1995.
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.
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.
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.
History of science and technology in Japan
In 1984, Sony introduced a LaserDisc format that could store any form of digital data, as a data storage device similar to CD-ROM, with a larger capacity of 3.28 GiB. The DVD format was developed by Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba in 1994. The same year, Sony and Tatung Company released the first DVD player.Flash memory (both NOR and NAND types) was invented by Dr. Fujio Masuoka while working for Toshiba around 1980.Dr. Norikazu Sawazaki invented a prototype video tape recorder in 1953, based on helical scan technology.In Japan, the computer was using digital video disks to display color pictures at 256x256 image resolution in 1972.
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).
History of hard disk drives
In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive and the 3348 data module, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated platters and the last IBM disk drive with removable media. This technology and its derivatives remained the standard through 2011. Project head Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle because 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. The name 'Winchester' and some derivatives are still common in some non-English speaking countries to generally refer to any hard disks (e.g. Hungary, Russia).
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.
History of the floppy disk
Shugart's initial 5.25" drive was the 35-track, single-sided SA-400, which was widely used in many early microcomputers, and which introduced the 34-pin interface that would become an industry standard. It could be used with either a hard or soft-sectored controller and storage capacity was listed as 90k (single density) or 113k (double density). The drive went on sale in late 1976 at a list price of $400, and $60 for a box of ten disks. The new, smaller disk format was taken up quickly, and by 1978 there were ten different manufacturers producing 5.25" drives. At one point, Shugart was turning out 4000 drives a day, but their ascendancy was short-lived and the company's fortunes declined in the early 1980s. Part of this was their failure to develop a reliable 80-track drive, increasing competition, and the loss of several lucrative contracts--Apple by 1982 had switched to using cheaper Alps drive mechanisms in their computers, and IBM chose Tandon as their sole supplier of disk drives for the PC. By 1977, they had been purchased by Xerox, who closed the operations in 1985 and sold the Shugart brand to a third party.
Reynold B. Johnson
Reynold B. Johnson (July 16, 1906September 15, 1998) was an American inventor and computer pioneer. A long-time employee of IBM, Johnson is said to be the "father" of the hard disk drive. Other inventions include automatic test scoring equipment and the videocassette tape.
John Haanstra
Born in San Francisco, California, Haanstra graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 with a degree in electrical engineering. In 1950 he went to work for IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. During the Korean War he was recalled to serve in the Navy. Following his discharge he rejoined IBM in 1952 in the San Jose Laboratory. He was responsible for designing the RAMAC, "the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive", introduced in 1953.
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.
Tallgrass Technologies
Tallgrass Technologies Corporation was the first manufacturer to offer a hard disk drive product for the IBM PC. Tallgrass was a Kansas City based microcomputer hardware and software company founded in December 1980 by David M. Allen. The hard disk drive product was initially sold in Computerland stores, alongside the original IBM PC. Tallgrass added tape-backup systems to its product line in 1982.
Macintosh External Disk Drive
The original Macintosh External Disk Drive (M0130) was introduced with the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. However, it did not actually ship until May 4, 1984, sixty days after Apple had promised it to dealers. Bill Fernandez was the project manager who oversaw the design and production of the drive. The drive case was designed to match the Macintosh and included the same 400K drive (a Sony-made " single-sided mechanism) installed inside the Macintosh. Although very similar to the 400K drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, confusingly all of these drives were labelled identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two, but both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk.
ST506/ST412
The ST506 HDD was the first 5.25 inch hard disk drive, introduced in 1980 by Shugart Technology (now Seagate Technology). It stored up to 5 megabytes after formatting and cost US $1,500 (). The similar, 10-megabyte ST412 HDD was introduced in late 1981. The ST225 was introduced shortly thereafter with 20 megabytes and half the height. All three used MFM encoding, a widely used coding scheme. A subsequent extension of the ST412 interface, the ST412HP interface, used RLL encoding for a 50% increase in capacity and bit rate.
Logical disk
When IBM first released the magnetic disk drive in the 1956 IBM 305, a single disk drive would be directly attached to each system, managed as a single entity. As the development of drives continued, it became apparent that reliability was a problem and systems using RAID technology evolved, so that more than one physical disk is used to produce a single logical disk.
History of hard disk drives
The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive. It was introduced in 1962 using the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters. It was followed by the IBM 2311 (1964) using the IBM 1316 disk pack to store 5 megabyte, IBM 2314 (1965) using the IBM 2316 disk pack to store 29 megabytes, the IBM 3330 using 3336 disk packs to store 100 megabytes and the 3330-11 using the 3336-11 to store 200 megabytes.Memorex in 1968 shipped the first HDD, the Memorex 630, plug compatible to an IBM model 2311 marking the beginning of independent competition (Plug Compatible Manufacturers or PCMs) for HDDs attached to IBM systems. It was followed in 1969 by the Memorex 660, an IBM 2314 compatible, which was OEM'ed to DEC and resold as the RP02.
Core International
Core sensed an opportunity to provide greater and faster computer data storage. After a five-year effort, in September 1982 they announced the availability of the first hard disk drives and local area network (LAN) for the IBM 5100 Series. IBM systems as sold were storage limited and without a network option; the 5100 had tape with the 5110 and 5120 restricted to 1.2 MB floppy disks. Core drives were available starting at 10 MB and increased up to 160 MB in removable and fixed configurations.
Solid-state drive
On January 14, 2008, EMC Corporation (EMC) became the first enterprise storage vendor to ship flash-based SSDs into its product portfolio when it announced it had selected STEC, Inc.'s Zeus-IOPS SSDs for its Symmetrix DMX systems. In 2008, Sun released the "Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems" (codenamed Amber Road), which use both solid state drives and conventional hard drives to take advantage of the speed offered by SSDs and the economy and capacity offered by conventional HDDs.
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.
Tallgrass Technologies
By the spring of 1981 the hard disk controller design was complete. Tallgrass initially tried marketing Allen's unorthodox hard disk controller alone, to system manufacturers. In mid-1981 it was decided to instead market a complete, external hard-disk subsystem (hard-drive + controller) to computer dealers. Tallgrass first developed subsystems for the Xerox 820 computer, for an Alpha Microsystems computer, and was working on an Apple IIe version when IBM announced the PC in August 1981.
IBM Research - Almaden
IBM opened its first West Coast research centre, the San Jose Research Laboratory in 1952, managed by Reynold B. Johnson. Amongst its first developments was the IBM 350, the first commercial moving head hard disk drive. Launched in 1956, this saw use in the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system. Subdivisions included the Advanced Systems Development Division. Directors of the center include hard disc drive developer Jack Harker.
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.
Western Digital
In 2003, Western Digital acquired most of the assets of bankrupt one-time market leading magnetic hard drive read-write head developer Read-Rite Corporation. In the same year, Western Digital offered the first 10,000 rpm Serial ATA HDD, the WD360GD "Raptor", with a capacity of 36 GB and an average access time of less than six milliseconds. Soon, the 74 GB WD740GD followed, which was also much quieter. In 2004, Western Digital redesigned its logo for the first time since 1997, with the design of new logo focusing on the company's initials ("WD"). In 2005, Western Digital released the 150 GB version, the WD1500, which was also available in a special version with a transparent window enabling the user to see the drive's heads move over the platters while the drive read and wrote data. , the Western Digital Raptor drives have a five-year warranty, making them a more attractive choice for inexpensive storage servers, where a large number of drives in constant use increases the likelihood of a drive failure.
David Paul Gregg
Dr. David Paul Gregg (March 11, 1923 - November 8, 2001) was the inventor of the Optical disc (disk). Gregg was inspired to create the optical disc in 1958 while working at California electronics company, Westrex, a part of Western Electric. His patent for a "Videodisk" was filed in March 1962 (USPO 3350503) while working to advance electron beam recording and reproducing.
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.
Shun-ichi Iwasaki
Shun-ichi Iwasaki (, "Iwasaki Shun’ichi"; born August 3, 1926) is a Japanese engineer. Until his retirement in 1989, he was professor at Tohoku University and until 1988 professor at the Lanzhou University (China). Iwasaki has been instrumental in the development of modern hard disks, for which he received several prizes.
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.
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.
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.
William Goddard (engineer)
William Goddard and John Lynott were key members of the San Jose, California–based engineering team, led by Reynold Johnson with the help of Louis Stevens, that developed the 350 Disk Storage Unit, a major component of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer. The magnetic disk drive symbolized a monumental advance in mass-storage technology. It is responsible for the end of sequential storage and batch processing with punched cards and paper tape.
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.
William Goddard (engineer)
William A. Goddard (July 10, 1913 in St. Joseph, Missouri – September 29, 1997 in Chico, California) was an engineer for IBM and an American inventor. He earned a degree in physics from Occidental College. Before working in industry, Goddard was a high school science teacher in Los Angeles. He briefly worked in the aerospace industry for North American Aviation, Inc. before becoming an engineer at International Business Machines (IBM). His most acclaimed achievement is co-inventing along with John Lynott United States Patent 3,503,060, which is entitled “Direct Access Magnetic Disc Storage Device”. This invention is the claims modern-day hard 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.
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.
Perpendicular recording
Vertimag Systems Corporation, founded by Professor Jack Judy of the University of Minnesota, a colleague of Iwasaki, created the first perpendicular disk drives, heads and disks in 1984. 5 MB removable floppy drives were demonstrated in IBM PCs to major computer manufacturers. Vertimag went out of business during the PC crash of 1985.
Terry Johnson (entrepreneur)
Terry Johnson (March 14,1935 – July 24, 2010) was an engineer and entrepreneur in the 1980s working in the area of data storage on hard disk drives  (HDD). After a stint with the US Navy as an electronics technician (1954–57), he earned degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Utah (BS 1961) and UC Berkeley (MS 1963). Johnson's early career included engineering and management roles in magnetic recording at IBM (1964–70) and Memorex (1971–73). He left Memorex to join in the development of "SuperDisk", a high-end, rotary actuator HDD funded by StorageTek and, in 1975, he relocated to Colorado. In 1980, Johnson left StorageTek to found a startup, Miniscribe, a manufacturer of 5.25 inch HDDs. In 1985, he started another new company, Co-Data, that subsequently merged with Conner Peripherals in 1986. Co-Data's 3.5-inch drive became Conner's first product. In 1985, Johnson co-founded PrairieTek, the first maker of 2.5 inch drives. Terry Johnson died in the Northwest Territories, Canada, when his private aircraft crashed during his return from a canoe trip.
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.
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.
Peter Grünberg
Peter Andreas Grünberg (18 May 1939 – 7 April 2018) was a German physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Albert Fert of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disk drives.
Optical disc drive
The first erasable optical disc drives were announced in 1983, by Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa (KDDI). Sony eventually released the first commercial erasable and rewritable 5.25-inch optical disc drive in 1987, with dual-sided discs capable of holding 325 MB per side.
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.
Hard Disk 20SC
The Apple Hard Disk 20SC (not to be confused with the Apple Macintosh Hard Disk 20, the first hard drive manufactured by Apple Computer exclusively for the original Macintosh floppy disk drive port interface) is Apple's first SCSI based hard drive for the Apple II family as well as the Macintosh and other third party computers using an industry standard SCSI interface.
JT Storage
JT Storage (also known as JTS Corporation, JTS Corp and JTS) was a maker of inexpensive IDE hard drives for personal computers based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1994 by "Jugi" Tandon—the inventor of the double-sided floppy disk drive and founder of Tandon Corporation—and Tom Mitchell, a co-founder of Seagate and former president and Chief Operating Officer of both Seagate and Conner Peripherals.
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).
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.
Hardcard
Quantum Corporation formed the Plus Development subsidiary in 1983. Plus Development invested their efforts in developing a hard disk drive that the average computer owner could install easily without much technical knowledge.
Compact Disc File System
The Compact Disc File System (CDFS) is a file system for read-only and write-once CD-ROMs developed by Simson Garfinkel and J. Spencer Love at the MIT Media Lab between 1985 and 1986. The file system provided for the creation, modification, renaming and deletion of files and directories on a write-once media. The file system was developed with a write-once CD-ROM simulator and was used to master one of the first CD-ROMs in 1986. CDFS was never sold, but its source code was published on the Internet and the CD-ROMs were distributed to Media Lab sponsors. The file system is the basis of WOFS (Write-once File System), sold by N/Hance systems in 1989.
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.
Parallel ATA
The first version of what is now called the ATA/ATAPI interface was developed by Western Digital under the name "Integrated Drive Electronics" (IDE). Together with Control Data Corporation (the hard drive manufacturer) and Compaq Computer (the initial customer), they developed the connector, the signaling protocols and so on, with the goal of remaining software compatible with the existing ST-506 hard drive interface. The first such drives appeared in Compaq PCs in 1986.
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.
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.
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").
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:
Priam Corporation
Priam Corporation was a company located in San Jose, California, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former Memorex executives, as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for mainframe computers, available for mini-computers and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980.