Hard-disk drives: 50 years and going strong
09/01/2006
Sally Bryant, IDEMA, The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Assoc.
As the hard-disk drive celebrates its 50th anniversary, the future for the industry has never been brighter. In fact, the industry is expected to ship as many drives in the next five years as it did in the last 50!
A lot has happened since the first hard drive, the RAMAC, shipped on September 13, 1956 (see Fig. 1). It weighed 2140 pounds, but held only 5 megabytes (MB) of data on fifty 24-inch platters. It leased for $35,000 a year. Today we’re seeing hard drives the size of a deck of cards that hold upward of 750 gigabytes (GB) of data-more than a 100 million times increase in storage. Few industries have seen such rapid technical advancement.
For the hard-disk drive (HDD) industry, it has been 50 years of continuous innovation, which has led to countless breakthroughs and patents and today has enabled a new era of mobile devices, consumer electronics products, and state-of-the-art enterprise tools. Today it is almost impossible to imagine a world without HDDs; they are ubiquitous due to achievements in cost, performance, size, and reliability. They have changed most aspects of our lives, including health care, banking, shopping, entertainment, and the way we gather and store information and photographs.
The New World for consumers
In the realm of consumer electronics, hard drives are a transforming technology. Many devices considered commonplace today would simply not be possible without HDD technology at their core. More than ever, consumers are holding their entertainment and personal data in digital formats and have demonstrated an insatiable appetite for storing more music, photos, video, and other personal documents. Analysts predict that in the next 5-10 years the average household will be a “digital home” with 10-20 hard drives in various applications, such as:
- camcorders with tiny drives to provide DVD-quality video recording capabilities;
- MP3 players and personal media players with HDDs to provide the storage capacity required for video-on-the-go;
- digital video recorders and advanced set-top boxes with hard drives for high-capacity storage;
- external storage devices, which continue to gain in popularity as consumers increasingly want to take their data with them; and
- telematics (hard drives in automobiles) to power on-board navigation/GPS systems and on-board entertainment systems.
 Figure 2. Microdrives-such as Seagate’s newest 1-in. drive, which holds 12GB of data-are helping to fuel the industry’s growth. (Courtesy: Seagate) |
The mobile market is another area of growth enabled by the HDD. Mobile computing devices need storage, both internal and removable. Thanks to the continued innovations that have made possible smaller form factors, larger capacities, lower power consumption, and better ruggedness, a new world of mobile devices is emerging. Drives such as Seagate’s newest 1-in. drive (see Fig. 2), which holds 12GB of data, are helping to fuel this growth. This new world includes:
- notebook computers replacing desktops for personal computing and for new emerging applications, including music, photos, and video, sometimes embedded in presentation spreadsheets;
- mobile access to enterprise systems and shared information among field forces;
- a novel generation of tablet computers for creating, sharing, and recalling information without a keyboard, for use in such areas as home health care, professional services, and field engineering; and
- a new class of handheld devices as mobile managers, PDAs, and mobile phones begin to "converge" (phones with video streaming, digital photo/video, and MP3 capabilities). Hard drives are the only storage solution that can process multiple data streams-audio and video-simultaneously.
New applications in the traditional enterprise and PC markets are also made possible by the continued innovation in HDDs. The new products and applications include state-of-the-art desktops and server systems for enterprise data centers. They also include massive storage systems for national libraries and university research centers for cataloging knowledge; oil and mineral exploration industries for capturing seismic data; and the research needs of particle physicists, human genome mappers, and astronomers.
Conclusion
The HDD industry looks forward to another 50 years of innovation, growth, and inclusion in new products made possible by new technologies. Its future is as golden as the anniversary it is celebrating. Impressive unit and revenue growth are anticipated as HDDs continue to steadily improve in key areas such as technology, density, performance, reliability, and cost.
Sally Bryant is senior director of program development and communications at IDEMA, the global trade association for the HDD industry. IDEMA, celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to play a key role in the HDD industry by providing tradeshows, technical conferences, and symposia, as well as setting technical and best-practice standards for the industry. IDEMA US, 470 Lakeside Dr. #A, Sunnyvale, CA 94085; ph 408/991-9430, www.idema.org.