My mechanical engineer dad used to work at R&D division of Maxtor (now acquired by Seagate) in Singapore during the 90s. He used to work on development of technologies to minimize the turbulence and vibration of the head caused by the spinning disks. Fluid mechanics was his specialization. He used to bring defective hard drives at home to show us, we used to play with them, lol. After the acquisition, he got laid off then started to teach at a university as a professor and used to use those defective hard drives as demos in his fluid mechanics classes. This video brought up those memories. Thanks. RIP dad.
Great story about Maxtor -- Jim Patterson (I think) worked at Shugart and wanted to build a 4 platter 5 1/4" drive with the idea of going higher to increase capacity (hence the name Maxtor). His boss at Shugart said it couldn't be done without an outboard bearing and that would make the drive too large. So Jim left and founded Maxtor. I think the largest drive they intro'd had 8 platters. Just another nail in Shugart's coffin.
Interesting video... I spent virtually my entire engineering career in the data storage biz... Started in the '70s when discs were big and brown, storing tens of megabytes... and finished a few years ago developing terabyte SSDs the size of a pack of gum. Worked at many of the big names and even a few of the startups lost along the way. The pace of development was always intense... and during the time the industry was transitioning its manufacturing offshore I spent a lot of time on 747s supporting Asian operations. Lots of highs and lows along the way... it was a heck of a ride... but happily out and retired... gone fishing.
@@InhalingWeaselgo into IT, the tremendous pace of inventing is still there, albeit not in "spinning rust" department anymore. Yeah, heat assisted is the last kick before settling back.
@@DoeJohn3rd Already there. Couldn't cut it as a developer or engineer so I went for data analytics to pay the bills. But I always loved poking around old hardware and never had the heart to throw any of my old PCs.
I remembered a school visit to an IBM office during the 1980s and seeing large washing machine size disk drives. Long forgotten how much data those could store but would've been pitifully small compared to what we have now.
Late 80's, a friend worked as a product manager for a hard disk company. He remarked one time, "Selling hard disks is a lot like selling fish. You only have so much time to move the product."
It was true, but there's a physical limit to reducing size on a platter. The rate of increase in storage has slowed a lot since the mid-2010s, the last five years seeing 2TB as most common high end replaced by 4TB. Multiple and stacked SSDs may be the only way to bring 50TB and 100TB into common use.
I mean, you can't freeze HDDs for later usage, so I'd say you actually have a bit less time to sell HDDs than you have to sell fish... you really got to do it while the HDD is still fresh!
I worked in a computer shop in the early 90s and the analogy I used was a vegetable stand. The shop was always ordering too much inventory and I tried to explain to him that the stuff was essentially "rotting" on our shelves because everything becomes obsolete. Except for VGA cables. lol
Correction: I was mistaken. The Winchester name did not come from the head actuator. I stand corrected. Should I delete the next paragraph? The Winchester name also comes from the head actuator action. Prior to the IBM 3340 the head actuators were based on voice coils to move the head in and out. A voice coil like a speaker uses. The Winchester actuator rotates the head assembly around a pivot point with a horizontal magnetic coil on the opposite end. This rotating action is similar to the lever action of a Winchester rifle. The Winchester action allowed the actuator assembly to be much more compact and had better head positioning precision. This is the head actuator design still used today. An interesting story is that my father Jack Harker was managing the Winchester project. At one point the project faced serious problems taking it from the lab to manufacturing. The problems were so severe Jack was considering pulling the plug on the project. At a meeting he made the offhand comment "If the team can make this work, I will walk on water." Needless to say, the problems were solved. IBM San Jose had reflecting pond with a tetrahedral sculpture that would twist in the wind. Jack had platforms built that were sunk a half inch under the water. With the launch of the 3340, there are pictures of him "walking on water" and kicking the surface of the water to make a spray. A nod to the hard work of the lab and manufacturing teams overcoming their obstacles. My father never mentioned the 30/30 naming story. He always said that the name came from the leaver action of the Winchester rifle.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_
Actually, the unique thing about the IBM 3340, and all subsequent hard drives (or "direct access storage device", "DASD" as is was called at IBM) was not the rotary actuator. That came much later. It was the fact that the heads, and the actuator that positioned them, were "parked" on the disk. This greatly simplified the actuator as the heads did not have to be carefully lowered down onto the disks when it was started up. This was achieved by putting lube on the disk so it would not stick to the disk when it was stopped, and designing the "slider" section of the head so that they "fly" close to the disk when it is spinning. Every increase in drive capacity that followed has included cleverly designed sliders that fly ever closer to the magnetic media on the disks. Today, to accommodate heads that fly super close to the disks, the heads are unloaded like they did before 1973. So it would be incorrect to call modern hard drives "Winchester" drives.
I work at a semiconductor company that makes some of the magic that makes hard drives work. It has basically become a single source industry for some of the components (like the preamps) that sit on the read heads and basically turn noise into signals at massive rates. It is pure magic.
Thank you for being an adept in those secret arts :D Without people like you, we'd have to go back to microfilm, or rather use flash and ssd's I guess... I think we could have had an "internet by postcard" much earlier, through clever use of microfilm and airmail, and i'm somewhat fascinated by that alternate history.
Error Correction codes in analog to digital conversion are the precursors to backpropagation in machine learning today. Both serve the function of fixing the signal coming up. Both are magic but everybody complains that machine learning is magic and that is bad which error correction coding is good. Go figure. There is good evidence that this type of signal correction is fundamental to all neural networks of the living kind.
I remember when Seagate introduced the first drive that automatically parked the hdd using the stored rotational energy in the platters to move the heads when it detected power loss.
Yes, before _self-parking drives,_ there really were problems... Not so much with the rotary "Winchester" actuator (still referred to as a *voice coil actuator, like the older linear type)* because it can move the heads quickly, but many of the other early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a much slower and much more power-hungry *stepper motor* head actuator, outside of the sealed platter enclosure. . In that type of HDD, the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had *literally been a doorstop* at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! Those tracks held the critical Boot, System, FAT and File Directory. Obviously, the R/W heads spent a LOT of time hovering over those 12 outermost tracks, and they definitely suffered when the power went off, which must have been often. But there was enough space on the hub side of the platters to create 12 totally new tracks when I repositioned the entire set of tracks, via the setscrew. So the drive still had the original capacity, it just had some smaller bits and bytes near the hub. At least for that kind of old MFM drive, relocating all the tracks was not a problem: The drive lasted several more years after my Revival Hack. Then it was given away, still working perfectly! . That was my first HDD, in 1987, and to me at that time a 10 MB capacity seemed enormous. But it was _S L O W!_ Then came multimedia and internet... For several years starting in 1996, I had to double my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various _much faster_ HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
Actually, the key for the industry HDD was not ST-506 [as all ignoramuses keep saying], but ST-412 with its ST-412 MFM revolutionary new interface! Shame on all these ignoramuses, who are able only to "judge a book by its cover" - by an external outlook...
My brother worked at Seagate, and would bring hope defective drives that were just thrown into the trash. We'd play with the magnets and platters. This was before you could just buy neodymium magnets on the internet, so I had the coolest show&tells at school. Plus lots of blood blisters...
In the early days, the 'supermagnets' in HDDs were often the Samarium-Cobalt type, which can operate at higher temperatures, and are slightly radioactive thanks to the Samarium.
@@YodaWhat awesome, i'll have to check my older hdd's 😅 I took apart a huge, older 5.25 inch hdd in ~2010. It had two "45 degree cylinder shell segment segment" magnets (two inches tall, ~3/8" thick, about 1.5" wide) for actuation, and a ~ 10-15 disk stack. I had blood blisters from those magnets, too.
My mechanical engineer dad used to work at R&D division of Maxtor (now acquired by Seagate) in Singapore during the 90s. He used to work on development of technologies to minimize the turbulence and vibration of the head created by the spinning plates. Fluid mechanics was his specialization. He also used to bring defective hard drives at home to show us, we used to play with them, lol. After the acquisition, he got laid off then started to teach at a university as a professor and used to use those defective hard drives as demos in his fluid mechanics classes. This video brought up those memories. RIP dad.
Ah yes, the supermagnet blood blisters haha. Something I know all too well. Although I'm 25, so I was a kid when they became very easily accessible online
Interesting fact not mentioned here: the tiny 1.8" hard drives used in the early iPods were not actually the smallest ones produced. There was, from 1998 to 2006, a line of truly miniature hard drives that fit into a Compact Flash card form factor, ranging in size from a few hundred megabytes up to a few gigabytes at the largest.
Such great content! In the 90's there was at least one adjacent worksite between Maxtor and Seagate (in Longmont Colorado which is close to Boulder that I sometimes see in videos). In the late 90's I worked at one of them on their pilot line. There were some couples with one spouse working for Seagate, and the other spouse working for Maxtor, which I thought was interesting. I even heard one guy pretended to "steal" his wife's car when he took visitors to lunch in order to try to show thriftiness vs. the other companies lavishness that their employees can afford nice cars. I wonder if the visitors bought any of it.
The Seagate facilities in MN were originally built by Control Data Corp. As CDC was slowly dismantled and its parts sold off in the 1980s, Seagate bought the disk drive division from CDC. I think it had originally been called Imprimis and was a joint venture with Honeywell. I think the two current Seagate buildings in MN, one in Bloomington, the other in Shakopee, were built by Seagate.
Seagate built a research and development center here in Pittsburgh in conjunction with CMU university in 2000 . It shut down a few years ago unfortunately .
The original Disc Drive is in Scotts Valley, California, about five miles from where I live. I worked for Atasi, one of the other disk drive companies that started at about the same time.
@@pscheie I worked for CDC/Magnetic Peripherals/Imprimis/Seagate (same company) in engineering and management for about 28 years. Started as an intern in college. It was a wild ride. There is incredible technology in a disc drive, most people have no idea. I was a survivor for a long time but eventually got the axe in a RIF (Reduction in Force). Severance was great and I needed to move on anyway. I got to have some input into the planning for the Shakopee facility, nicest place I ever worked. Hardest part of management was terminating people when the inevitable down turns came. Employees that I had hired into my department, many with over 30 years of service.
Hey Gene! MDW finally matured to the point they didn't need us anymore so we went into R&D then got sold to Luminar. Layoff there in early April so I'm retired now. For you other folks out there, Gene and I worked at MPI which became Imprimis and then Seagate. Seagate was a garage shop when it bought Imprimis in '90. Seagate was mote or less assimilated by Imprimus so the Seagate stuff in here is pretty worthless. We were way beyond Seagate. We worked in the servo track writer area under Dick Yonke and Bill Roling. Originally hard drives had one servo disk that defined where the heads should go but when Cuda 11 came out the servo was embedded on all surfaces to compensate for thermal growth. We found that squeezing the bearing shafts during STW (servo track writing) tightened up the bearings and improved the metrics. John Runyon optimized the optical feedback system for it. Genes group built hundreds of those things. Each writing one drive at a time. As the TPI increased it took longer and longer to do and the bearings and laser interferometer was having more and more challenges along with the limitations of the vibrating drive structure. Then while evaluating single disc's written on Brent Weichelts' single disk tester I had an idea. I went to Bill and suggested we try stacking disks and writing them outside of the drive then install them like how Barb Madge and I did for prototype drives. Lon Buske, Brent. Rodney Dahlenburg, Roger Karau and Ralph Hilla built a demo and the sucker actually worked and allowed us to go over 100 ktpi. The next few years under Louis Boman with assistance from Xyratex and Professional Instruments, and Brenk Brothers Inc we developed the device and installed 6000 of them in California and then into Singapore. These devices are still in operation. The air bearing spindles from PI have an nrro of 12 nano inches so they have a way to go. @genethompson8764
I recall in the early days of the PC revolution, when the 20MB hard drive came out and I thought to myself... "I'll never fill that thing up." [Also note Robert Harker's post just below. His post is very important.]
I still have my first XT clone. Well, and XT clone, after I added a 20MB Seagate HD, with its associate full length MFM interface card. Used it for quite a while, as I later added a 24 channel logic analyzer card, so that PC was just used a piece of test gear.
@@michaelmoorrees3585 you've got a piece of artwork. Could maybe sell for big $$$$. What I regret most was throwing my IBM/clone keyboards away. Today, we type on chiclets. Heavy sigh.
That was your best one since the ATI video! Thanks! On a side note, my first HDD was a Supra 20MB drive for the Commodore Amiga 500 in about 1987. A 2-part beast of a drive that was basically two shoe boxes. One to connect to the motherboard, then a massive cable that ran to the other shoebox that held the drive which I placed about 12” higher than the computer up on my bureau. Had to manually park heads before touching it to move it. It was glorious.
A practical 4 megabyte memory in 1956 really was a revolution. The computer "Colossus" built in the early 1940s by the UK's Post Office Research Station had a memory of a few hundred bits, implemented by thyratrons. These are a type of vacuum tube (called a valve in the UK; also the thyratron shouldn't really be called a vacuum tube because it has mercury vapour in it) that once signalled into conduction continues to conduct until the current is stopped by some external cause. Each of them needs about one watt to heat the cathode to keep the thyratron working. This means that 4 megabytes implemented by thyratrons would have 32 million of them and would consume tens of megawatts of electricity, the failure of which would cause the memory to forget everything that is in it. Now we take for granted that we can have hundreds of gigabytes of memory on something the size of our little finger nails and costing a few dollars.
Colossus was not a classical von Neuman binary computer. It was bi-quinary. This means it was a simplified decimal system but instead of 10 tubes to represent 0 to 10 it used 6 (a binary one would use 8 in a flip flop config). Using ring counters saved tubes and avoided more complex logic (as decatron and trocotron were not yet invented). But it hasn't memory in the classical sense, it basically simulated the Lorenz machine with ring counters with a more logic added to control.
My Dad worked for the UK Post Office, and I remember him telling me that his team had acquired a "Winchester Drive" (no mention of an attached computer). This allowed them to record the number and duration of phone calls across the UK, and decide where to build new lines and allocate new phone handsets
I was a five year old child in the IBM lab on Santa Clara Street during weekends in 1960. It is pronounced RAM MAC, not RayMac. The heads don't fly because of wobble, they fly with compressed air at the head to keep the distance constant and be immune from folks bumping into the drive. When the heads were first designed they would fly but easily crashed into the surface wrecking the magnetic surface when someone walked by. My father developed the idea of using a wing to force the head against a bubble of air and these forces self regulated as the heads became closer to the disc. The original drive was a spinning drum looked not unlike a spinning garbage can. Disc platters was an innovation. The name Winchester comes from the mystery house not the gun. The project name became the product name when they came up with the idea of 30-30 to overcome the objection of T. Watson Jr. Al Shugart, Amdahl, and others all came out of San Jose. Shugart is most famous for making non compete clauses illegal in California by bringing an 1862 law back to life in a case against Zerox v. Shugart.
The thin film heads on the 3380 “flew” due to the configuration of the “rails” on the slider (head) with some appropriate downward force from the suspension. In the beginning IBM tested the fly height on both sides of the head (the rails). The heads were very aerodynamically simple. Source of information, worked as an engineer on the fly height testers.
18:55 - the anti-static lab coats didn't have wires, but carbon-impregnated threads, conductive enough to dissipate static, but not enough to create a shock hazard. Similarly, grounding straps have ~1 Meg-ohm resistors in series so your body isn't subjected to high currents if you grab a live wire.
Starting my data processing business, I made sure every computer I bought had TWO hard drives, I would read from one, write to the other as I ran my data through various steps. This really helped the throughput
That's a nice trick, I always did that when I had to move virtual machines, you move them to another array with different disks, so you don't bog down the transfer forcing random access instead of sequential access.
I also have two drives in every computer, but for a different reason... I run them in RAID-1 configuration so if a drive goes bad, I don't lose data. I just swap in a replacement and let the RAID array rebuild itself.
@@RonJohn63well the tape drive is purely sequential access with enormous seek penalties, a hard drive is better for sequential access but the odd random seek isn't a huge penalty.
At a trade show in the early ‘80s I saw a large number of terminals connected to a base with a hard drive. I asked the spokesman “You mean all of these terminals are fighting to use this one hard drive?” He replied “We prefer to call it ‘sharing’.”
Yes, it's amusing to think that organizations had dozens or hundreds of people competing for use of a single hard drive on the network which could do maybe 100-250 IOPS. Now a cheap laptop has an SSD that can do 250K IOPS
In South Africa, we called the 3.5" diskettes Stiffies, and I could not understand why our American supplier ladies laughed so much without telling me why.
I remember hearing that term at a business meeting in Zimbabwe when a female vendor from South Africa was asked for a copy of the PowerPoint presentation she had just presented. She turned to him and said "Give me a stiffy". We Americans had no clue what she was really talking about and burst out laughing. LOL.
You missed a whole generation of hard disks. Check out Bryant disks drives. Bryant was head quartered in Detroit MI. The disks were 36 in. in diameter. The drives were massive required a huge 220 Volt motor to spine them. The motor was coupled to the disks with 6 drive belts and pullies. The heads actuator was driven by hydraulics. The disk housing was about 4 ft high, 5 ft. wide 5 ft. deep. The dive motor, hydraulic pump, and AC unit was in a separate housing. The whole floor of the computer room would shake when the heads moved. The whole drive only held 64k of data.
Bryant also manufactured "magnetic drums". The floating heads were fixed in place, but switched electrically. There were spare heads to replace "crashed " and consequently, damaged tracks. The drums required almost a "clean room" environment to keep the drums running reliably . But, they were almost silent when running. I worked as a "peripheral test tech" at CDC in St Paul, MN in the late '60s. All of these "peripherals" required a "controller" to interface with a PPU ( peripheral processor unit) which would interface with the CPU. Ah, the "good old days" when a computer system REQUIRED a room full of equipment!!!
Wonderful analysis. Brings back fond memories. I was there at IBM for the transition from ink disks to Thin Film Disks. The first thin film disks were aluminum/magnesium disks coated with 10 microns of electroless nickel phosphorous plating. The nickel plating was nonmagnetic and amorphous. So it was the perfect substrate for the magnetic film. The amorphous NiP plating allowed it to be chemically mechanically polished to an atomic finish. My first attempt at a magnetic film was an electroless plated cobalt phosphorus plating. 11 Megabits/square inch!! World Record for two weeks! In the blink of a young girl's eye came sputter coating with Cobalt Platinum Tantalum Chrome. Passed me bye. Can't plate that alloy. So, then, cover the sputter layer with a sputtered layer of Diamond Like Carbon and fluoro-lube and Voila! You have the thin film disk. Add a thin film (plated) head to it and let fly! Damn, that was a glorious process!
I was testing those disc's at Imprimis with glide heads and comparing them to the new FSD3 disks. The IBM disks were far smoother. One day Tom Murnan came down to the lab exclaiming how we had just made the ultimate thin film disc's and could I please test them with the heads that Harold Beecroft had designed. I put them on the tester and " b'ding, ding,ding...." ! They had forgotten to take the plastic wrap off of the oven heaters before they cured the lube! The disks were covered in little plastic bumps. He was so mad.
Instead of a HDD, I spent my money on a SoundBlaster (TM), and was the first kid in the village to have proper PC sound. That really impressed all the other nerds around me (2 or 3).
I was one of those kids you hated because they had a Voodoo SLI. 🤣 SoundBlaster was game changer.. Then came 3dfx and Voodoo with OpenGL which completely flippped the table over again and then some, until Nvidia realized SLI was too powerful that they could not even fix it and EOL'd it from gaming history.
I spent just over 3k in my junior year of college (in '95) on a higher end Dell pentium. Sound blaster sound, probably 2GB memory and probably something like a 20 or 30 GB hdd. Don't remember the exact specs but windows 95 was impressive back then. Sadly in about 5 years all this was ancient tech and the cost of a rig with much better specs was significantly cheaper.😢 Kinda wished that i had kept it.
The big IBM disk packs were great. I modified an old one to be a "Cake Dome". I would bring donuts in for the IT staff and place them under the plastic dome. This was great fun but eventually, the younger IT staff didn't even know the dome was from.
Thanks for the passing reference to Priam.... I worked for them in the 80's, at their repair centre in Reading, UK.... We were selling 14", 8", and eventually 5 1/4 inch Winchester drives.... I remember them releasing a full height 5 1/4 inch drive boasting a whole 760Mb, and thinking it was a massive breakthrough.... Totally outgunned by Seagate etc, and the company folded just after I left....
Very cool! Priam did sell a few 3.5" drives very late in their life, but they are hideously rare. To this day I've never personally seen even a photo of one.
Great story. I was a VC back in the 1980's and financed both Seagate and Connor. It was a wild ride. MiniScribe was particularly interesting to watch as, under intense pressure to grow revenue, they started shipping bricks in packaging that looked like a disk drive to inventory and claiming it as revenue - ultimately they were caught and a huge class action suit ensued taking down some of the BOD members for failing to provide governance. Another side story worth tuning into was the read/write optical disc category. Thanks for doing this - it brought back some interesting memories.
I made $$ via the ups/downs of Seagate, but lost a bunch when Miniscribe failed. Those years of competition were fierce. Miniscribe had decent reliably suggesting solid QA but couldn't get volume to meet selling margins. I imagine every maker struggling with QA issues vs volume of complex assemblies. Brutal competition in the marketplace..
I can add a bit more color. I was a partner with the Hambrecht & Quist VC group when Bill Hambrecht did the MiniScribe deal and went on the BOD. All of us at H&Q worked independently then, so I had no direct involvement in that deal or even knowledge of it until it happened. In fact, I offered financing to Finis Connor, and that was yet another wild ride. But when Bil Hambrecht brought in QT Wiles to be Chairman of H&Q Inc. and he started his autocratic BS, I decided to leave, joining Oak Investment Partners in 1986. It didn't take long for H&Q to fail after that. The whole MiniScribe fiasco blew up after I left H&Q but that didn't stop the class action lawyers from naming all 21 partners who were in the H&Q VC group at the time the deal was done as co-defendants in the action. It took some wrangling but all except Bill himself were dismissed from the suit. I know QT ended up in prison and a $250M fine, and that Bill was required to pay a substantial sum, as were others. A classic story of how an entire organization evolve into unethical practices when the autocratic CEO is relentlessly demanding. I always thought QT was a shill - an arrogant poser who had a lot of people fooled.
@@David_Best Had no idea that the VC firm might get sued. I never got much from the suit, like most investors - lawyers gain, we don't. I just am sad that so many had to be involved in the deception. A period of wild competition but a lot of technical progress. As a small time PC builder, profits were consumed by inventory - scale and inventory turns were the path to survival as the PC became a commodity. Heady times.
@@hardeehodges326 Just to be clear, the suit targeted the partners in the VC partnership directly - not the partnership, but the individuals. So a lot of anxiety as all 21 of us could have or net wroth extinguished. I have heard that BIll Hambrecht lost half of his wealth in the settlement, 40 percent of which went to the lawyers.
SSD'S ARE SO MUCH MORE RELIABLE!!! I HAVE NOT HAD ANY CRASHES IN ANY OF MY CUSTOMERS MACHINES THAT I HAVE INSTALLED SSD'S IN. EVERY TIME YOU RUN SCANDISK YOU WILL SEE ERRORS AND MULTIPLE CRASHED DRIVES IN HDD'S PER YEAR. AND PRICES FOR SSD ARE ALMOST EQUAL OR LESS THAN HDD'S. EVERY UPGRADE TO I HAVE DONE IN THE LAST YEAR HAS BEEN AN SSD. IN 2 OR 3 YEARS ALL HDDS WILL BE OUT OF PRODUCTION AND REPLACED BY SSD'S.
@@computerpro123abc I have 16 HDD in my NAS server, they've been running for YEARS, no issues. Granted they're enterprise grade drives. I've had issues with SSD's though, they wear out with time too. I think the high failure rates are because consumer HDD's are garbage, but that doesn't mean all HDD's are going to be replaced. There still is no affordable option for the amount of storage I have if I switch to SSD's.
@@Psilobite Technically they already exist, but mainly for the server market. It turns out you can buy a 30TB SSD on newegg for $5000+ There's a PCIe board that supports 4 NVMe drives and if you had money to burn you could put 4 $800 8TB NVMe drives on it and call it 32TB. HDDs are obviously cheaper, but they've been about the same price for a decade, so SSD is likely to surpass it soon.
@@computerpro123abc Bud, I have 40 year old hard disks with no bad sectors that work, and flash memory that failed after only a decade. I work in IT, I see a lot of failures on flash memory type devices. Also, stop yelling, you're coming across as an angry 12 year old Internet user from the early 2000s.
I'll never forget holding a 7500rpm IBM Deskstar drive in my hand while it was fully connected and spun-up. Something suddenly went wrong and the drive launched from my hand and flew 15 feet accross the room. I gained renewed respect for what was going on inside that shiny metal case!
@@mrtechie6810 Stiction was mostly Seagate in the era of the ST251, the ST277R RLL version, and the ST296N SCSI version (I had a ST296N for a while but it was on my BBS, never got shut down, so never had it "stick"). I don't remember if they made a ESDI version of that drive mechanism. Also affected some ST225/ST238R drives at the time.
@@bricefleckenstein9666Original Veloci-Raptors were 3.5 inch 15K rpm drives. They later downsized them to 2.5s in a 3.5 heatsink. I still have two brand new 150GB velociraptors that were spares for a raid 10 array.
I remember the days when I had to use a park command to park the HDD heads before shutting down the computer. If I forgot, data loss and damage to the platters was a really expensive reminder.
@@capella5783 As explained in the video, with modern hard drives, they use the momentum of the platters as they spin down to park the heads. Back in the early 80's everyone that didn't want their hard drives to crash the first time the power was interrupted had a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) between the wall outlet and their computer. And you are correct that I can unplug or turn the power off at the breaker and it will not effect my computer at all. that's because my laptop has a built-in uninterruptible power supply. And yes, I do use the shut-down menu when I turn it off. From the desktop press Alt+F4 to open the shutdown menu.
At 18:57, the "Seagate uniform" doesn't dissipate static. It's designed to NOT produce any electrostatic discharge. Wearing static discharge shoes or a static strap connected to a ground does that. The jacket merely acts as a Faraday cage preventing any of the static generated by the body from reaching the electronics BUT it requires a ground strap that is grounded!!
8:00 - Appropriate timing, as the first floppies I used were 8" floppies. They weren't Shugarts, but made by Cal Comp, which most people associate them with pen plotters. If you ever worked with Cal Comp floppy drives, you'll know why they're not know for making floppies.
@@melvance7281 Larger discs would have been "disk packs" or hard drives. IBM originated the entire floppy disc concept with their 8" floppy - used for mainframe boot loaders initially.
When I started buying floppies, Memorex was the quality brand and unlabeled "No Name" disks was the high failure rate alternative. I later switched to buying Nashua (apparently a HDD platter brand) floppies for most tasks, until market collapsed forced everyone to buy essentially rebadged no name . Now this consumable isn't produced any more.
Anyone remember KOMAG? Headquartered in Milpitas, CA but did all manufacturing in Malaysia. At their peak, I believe they were the world's largest platter manufacturer.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
Great video. I am an HDD engineering veteran. I got my start way back in 1982 with a startup that made thin-film heads. This was back in the day when the transition from wound ferrite heads were being replaced by a thin film transducer head made using semiconductor fab techniques. The hard drive will still be around. The main reason is because it is a very low-cost method for storing data. Most of the younger folks typically use a combination of SSD along with HDD in their computing and gaming rigs.
Ah, the old days. I remember being green with envy at people who had hard drives. Not just for the storage but the speed; floppies were so disgustingly slow. Initial cost aside, I raise a glass to all the hard drive engineers.
> TELL me about your troubles. In fall, 1965, my high school acquired a Monroe, Monrobot desk sized computer available for student use. Main memory was a magnetic drum. IO was an IBM typewriter + paper tape input and output. So compare floppies with that paper tape IO
@@negirno For sure, floppies were a godsend over tape. But when hard disks arrived, I suffered "my storage solution is crap" heartburn all over again. With 8-bit machines, the floppies were larger than the computer's RAM so I didn't really mind, but with the 16-bit PCs, that was less the case, and then the database apps like dBase cropped up along with word processors that implemented virtual memory, and then floppies became painful. All I could think was, hard drives are the natural solution. Friends who worked with mainframes and minicomputers would mention how they always used hard disks and that VM was an OS level feature for all apps, and smoke would come out my ears in envy.
@@negirno Distant memories. Way back on my BBC micro I wrote wha could almost be called virtual memory. The issue was some games that came on tape but now I had a floppy disk - such speed and capacity! But the downside was that the FDD driver took about 1K of RAM and the games used every last byte. I wrote some assembler that intercepted FDD commands and moved 1K of RAM into the video space while the disk operation was running to free up enough space. It worked perfectly, the only side effect was a crazy screen while accessing the floppy. I had single stepped through the entire OS (EXMON ROM) and knew everything on this machine from top to bottom. This is no longer possible, has not been for decades and never will be possible again but it was a good feeling to know exactly how everything worked. But how did I cope with the limitations of floppies and even worse with tapes?
Wow!! I remember taking a day of sick leave so I could drive to Seattle and buy a windows compatible iPod. It was the coolest thing ever to be able to start one song after another. Patched it in to a run of the mill home stereo and it was an instant celebrity! I paid over 400.00 and I think it was a 5GB version? Maybe it was a 20GB. Can't recall the specifics. All I know was it forever changed how I listened to music. I have owned dozens of the various models over the years. The first one ended up getting stolen at a small party of co workers. I still wonder who actually took it. Sucks to be them. I just bought another one but kept it on a shorter leash. Back in the day when I made all the coin I wanted building the 747.
Absolutely - it will be at least another decade before solid state can compete price wise (I just today bought a 20TB drive to add to my 100TB media collection. Spending that much for solid state would cost me more than my house .
@@MikeDKelley But also, HDDs make more sense for "storage" to me. Why get an SSD which naturally has high performance just to store data on. I mainly use smaller SSDs for storage of things that benefit from the high speed like apps and games, but use large HDDs for everything else. I can't imagine not using HDDs.
@@HScarlet I think it will happen - even for a very old man like me I could see a day when HDDs are obsolete. But, as I say, it will take a while yet, maybe more than a decade. Just too expensive to compete.
I worked for an IBM competitor and time after time they bungled their lead. Made us happy. They invented the HDD. (I saw the first prototype in the lobby of one of their buildings in San Jose. It was in rough shape showing how little the gerstner team understood the value of their past successes. I heard they were going to scrap it at the same time they were getting rid of their museum, and somebody talked them into donating it to a museum). I remember when they moved their HDD manufacturing to SE Asia and the UK. Rumor was they decided Moore's Law had run its course and there was no more big gains in capacity coming. As terrible a decision as when they moved their tape to Mexico, but I digress. Their engineers in California would get calls in the middle of the night about production line problems. The lines would be shut down while the engineers had to find the next flights to the plants arriving exhausted to try to tackle the problem that was keeping the lines down. Of course that added costs and hurt production/sales. Offshoring their HDD manufacturing was as poorly thought out executive decision as any I have ever seen. In the end they sold out to Hitachi showing it as over $1B line on their books. 5 years later they had to reverse that CYA entry as an $80M loss. I don't remember any of their execs being fired, but lots of their engineers were submitting resumes around the industry.
It wasn't the outsourcing that was the issue - MOST if not ALL HDD manufacturing was getting outsourced around the same timeframe. It was the poorly done job of DOING the outsourcing that was the issue.
Thanks for putting this together. It was a fast trip through the life of the hard drive and omitted many stories but gave us a good look at what transpired. A couple side notes. Finis Connor was associated with Al Shugart in one of the early companies. When Terry Johnson and John Squire started CoData in the 80's they needed someone with more industry wide exposure to get the product out. They got together with Finis Conner and renamed the company Conner Peripherals. Terry Johnson was the founder of Miniscribe.
In the 80's, my company used to print like 20,000 mailers advertising projected hard drive disc trends. As they all absorbed each other, it became less & less, until there were 5 or 10 remaining. Silicon valley location
Wow Mr Shugart could not stop winning. Founded a successful company which held on to his name so he needed to come up with a different name so he could start another even more successful company.
One of the Shugart companies also made Hard Disk Controllers. I had to modify one of them for a Z-80 computer so that it would reduce the system clock speed from the "turbo speed" 4 MHz to the "normal" 2 MHz, but only for the 16 bytes that had to be fetched from a Boot ROM on the Shugart HDD controller. Then the system speed reverted to a *screamin' 4 MHz.* _All sounds like a joke now, but that's how it was in 1979!_
@@YodaWhat Oh no, doesn't sound like a joke to me. Computers with that level of processing power are theoretically no less useful now than they were then. The modern world is spoiled with orders of magnitude more processing power than we need. Modern computing is more of a joke than computing back then because of the insane waste.
@@mysterium364 Ikr?, for instance, an Intel Xeon processor with 14 cores, 28 thread and 35 MB of cache from 2016 that costed +2000 US$ stopped getting support from intel in 2022 and is now deemed obsolete, you can find them second hand for less than 100$, but if you buy it you're stuck with windows 10 because it is not compatible with windows 11.
@4:46, that's Thomas Watson Jr., son of IBM founder. I found a signed copy of his biography at a thrift store like 2 years ago. Didn't know much about him or the company. The craziest thing I learned from the book is, IBM started out making very precise meat slicer and scale for butcher shops.
Learning HDD prices cost me my innocence. When I built my first computer at 10 I ended up learning a lot about international trade just to understand what was a good price for a HDD. It was my eye opening moment about class disparity between countries as well as a number of other things.
Yeah I started getting into production, right in that period between 2011 and 2013.. I actually just learned the other week why there's a certain amount of drives that are always failing me, when the brand type etc had been reputable and are still reputable.. never occurred to me that that entire batch of drives was just dead drives walking from the earthquakes and tsunamis.. to this day apparently never buy a 3 GB Seagate, and and basically anything that was made during that time, cuz they the parts are so bespoke and need to be so precise that even the minorest of of complications in the manufacturing process.. I guess it's good to have an answer finally, I never thought about it but lol I just thought everything was getting worse and worse but.. boy I wish I had known that back then, cuz I did not back things up or run in raid even, as it was so expensive I needed all the space I got and I was using it as soon as I would get one lol.
You were learning international trade in computer parts at the age of 10. When computer itself was the newest tech on the block. You must be bill gates and Elon Musk combined. The whole world bows at your feet. Your highness!
I started IT in the 80's so I remember having my hands on every drive in this video nor can I even count the amount of systems I put together with them over the years. Has to be 4-5 thousand. Fun fact: When the IBM PC/AT (5170) came out they contracted with Computer Memories, Inc. for the 20MB drive that came in the AT. We had a 50 percent failure rate in the first 24-48 hours of burn in. Somewhere around here I still have some photos of a table in the lab with about a 100 of them waiting to go back to IBM for replacement. After 1 year IBM canceled the contract with CMI and then they got sued for Patten infringement and the whole company shutdown and yet another one bites the dust. Eventually,, after so many failures, we started replacing all the 20MB CMI drives with the CDC630 (30 Meg) and had great luck with those plus our customers got another 10meg of data IBM still was not selling yet. 10 whole megabytes more. WoW.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 IBM had multiple sources. CMI was successful using FDD head actuators that kept their price low. They started with a 5MB drive, doubled the density to 10 MB successfully but ran into trouble when they tried doing a 20 MB version as the FDD stepper motor was not precise enough to stay on track and their attempt to get to 40 MB was the straw that broke the company's back. I was working at CDC when they introduced the first commercially available 5 MB 2.5" HDD they called the 'Cricket'. The competition promptly announced competing 5 MB drives and were subsequently shocked when they discovered the Cricket was actually a 10 MB drive just by removing a jumper on the interface. Heh heh!
EMC put a bunch of cheap HDDs in a box, added some firmware, and chipped away at IBM's big storage arrays. Incredible growth in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, EMC acquired Data General for their mid-range storage systems.
By 85 the standard had long since shifted to 10MB, with the Seagate ST-412's introduction in 1981 and IBM's selection of that drive for use in the XT as an option the next year. The Seagate ST-225, one of the most prolific and affordable 20MB drives was launched the year prior in 1984.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
I man I knew in 85 when I was getting into the warez scene on the C64 had one of those 5mb HDDs hooked up somehow through the serial port on his C64. And he was GOD to us kids. An entire shoebox of 170k 5.25 floppy discs in a single noisy vibrating box, it was unreal. And yet only 4 years later I had a 20mb HDD hooked up to my Amiga 500, and 3 years after that 105mb on my 386-40. This industry grew insanely fast.
@@exidy-yt I know how you feel. It's similar with RAM. I remember some earlier computers had 512kb of RAM, early laptops among others. Then in 1994 I had a Pentium 60MHz with 8MB. Now we're at a 16GB standard. Just that is 2048 times more.
A great book I recommend reading is Clayton Christensen's "The Innovators Dilemma" - In this book Clay uses the HDD industry as an example to study the topic of innovation lots of really eye opening insights
hdds have evolved to the point that i went down to my local computer electronics store and found that 1tb,2tb,4tb,8tb hdd all not being that far off in price with the 16tb being roughly 30% more expensive than the 8tb. currently have a pair of 16tb drives for raw storage capacity and they work pretty damn well.
Same here, 3 x 16TB's in the machine for bulk storage, running through a 2tb gen 5 SSD as a cache for quick access when I need to access the same data over and over. For non bulk I now use Gen 5 and Gen 4, 1 or 2 TB SSD's. Who would have thought that 1 or 2 TB would now be classed as non bulk storage.... lol
@@JoannaHammond yeah i got a 2tb nvme scratch disk for whatever i'm working on at that moment but once i'm done it's sent off to the hdd. the 250gb nvme boot disk is sometimes used in scratch disk work as well
@@incumbentvinyl9291 When you need 16TB or more storage plus backup, SSDs aren't "dirt cheap". Plus SSDs aren't more reliable when you put them in a closet for cold storage. You can't keep them off of electricity for too long (a year at most) or they will start to lose data because the cells lose their voltage.
I remember worrying about which way to orient the HD. Somewhere I read ("Byte" probably) that the HD should be kept in the same orientation it had been in when you formatted it. I guess we were afraid gravity could affect that delicate head that was flying around in there.
The concern was not of head flying height, but of actuation. Early drives had no servo tracking (running open loop) and so positioning errors could cause data loss and corruption. These errors would be exacerbated by changes in the orientation of the drive. Many drives had "unacceptable" mounting positions, typically vertical mounting in either direction, and many drives did not appreciate being upside down. There are a few oddballs which cannot be on their side either - This affects the positioner accuracy severely.
I bought a 5¼ full height 330MB drive in 1990 or 1991, for $300 -- less than a buck a megabyte! I also bought some little dinky IBM drive, about the plan size of my thumb but only a couple of mm thick. Got it out of curiosity, used it for a few months but I don't remember what for, and 5 or 10 years later found it buried in a box, and it still worked!
6:57 I remeber the disk Packs back in the mid 1970s. We opened a large disk reader about the size of a dish washer, lowered the cannister inside, gave it a small twist to unlock it, and pulled out the outer covering leaving the disk stack inside.
That takes me back to when I added a ST506 on my 6809 based Smoke Signal Broadcasting computer. Back when I was pretty good at wire-wrapping interface boards and the 68008 upgrade board.
i worked as an intern at IBM San Jose in 1990 and saw that first giant platter on display. Later I saw a 100MB 2.5 inch drive and wondered who would ever need such a huge amount of storage?
...and now we can snap a few photos within half a second with our phones that take up that much storage capacity. They are also saved on our tiny phone almost instantaneously.
At least, I had the opportunity to use the removable disk pack in the university research group's VAX lab. So early days it is. I also remember those huge Shuggart Associate's 8-inch floppy disk drives and a thick operator's manual. One of the special design is need to adjust the spring tensioning for the Read-Write head assembly based on how SA800 is mounted. Gravity matters due to its size and weight. Another interesting topic is the ST506 interface. The spec has two sets of cable for control and data. A hard drive controller (early ones on ISA bus) is needed to handle the IO abstraction and data encoding/decoding (MFM to RLL, etc. etc. ) tasks.
We had at least a pair of 2.5 MB "disk pack" drive on the PDP-11/70 I learned to program on when I was at Rose-Hulman. I forget exactly, but I want to say RK-02 or RL-02 models? Western Digital got it's start in the "Drive controller" side of the industry, working with the ST-506 interface (and it's RLL version), and the later ESDI interface (which was similar but higher performance).
@@chesshooligan1282Hard drives will still be around for decades to come, or until SSDs match the price per GB of HDDs. You cannot get a 10TB SSD at the price of a 10TB HDD yet, and I don't see it happening in 5 years.
@@GoldSrc_ SSDs are way more reliable and miles ahead in terms of performance. No need to match price per terabyte if you only need half the number of SSDs for the same reliability. We're getting pretty close to that. There are also newer SSDs that can be written virtually an infinite number of times. Still very expensive, but they'll come down in price. If I had to put my money on it, I would say five years until the hard drive joins the floppy disc in the history books.
My first PC computer was an IBM compatible 286 with a 10mb HDD, cost £2500 used, and was a few years old. It seemed lightning fast back then. Memory was selling then for £100 for a 1mb stick. Offices were broken into to steal the memory sticks out of computers, they left the computers, just took the memory.
Nice country. Also hear people were stealing them from school computers in the 90s. Apparently many smart kids never got in any kind of trouble, because no one ever noticed they nicked just one of the two RAMs. The computer would still be ok for the tasks at the school, just a bit slower.
@6:00 you overlooked the 1311 and later the 2311 disk drives that used a smaller 1316 disk pack. The 1311 was the first removable pack disk drive. These were about the size of a largish washing machine with a hinged lid that lifted up to allow the packs to be mounted and changed. There were 10 heads on a hydraulic (yes, bloody hydraulic!) actuator, and each head was about the size of a thumbnail, with a very slight radius that forced air rotating with the disk to lift the heads and make them fly over the disk surface. This produced a lot of lifting force - the arms of the actuator had springs that pressed the head onto the disk with a surprisingly strong pressure to counter the lifting force. There were even two holes in the head (really the shoe that held the head) to let some of that air out, so that the head could get closer to the disk. I actually owned two 1311 drives back in the late 70s. I never got my 6800/Z80 home made PC's to read and write data to them, but I did get the actuator working. In the seek test, especially for short movements, the actuator moved so fast that it was was a blur. There was a toothed wheel on the actuator drive mechanism, with a detent arm that locked the wheel in position for each of the 100 actuator positions (200 for the 2311). The detent arm was also driven in and out hydraulically, so there was a lot going on in the seeking operation. It was amazing how fast it worked. For even more amazingly fast early (and also hydraulic) IBM data storage technology, take a look at the weird and wonderful 2321 Data Cell Drive... My very old page about it: members.optusnet.com.au/intaretro/2321DCD.htm
In the early '80s I was excited to get an Atari 1200XL, which I quickly realized needed a B.A.S.I.C. cartridge to be able to program, (I had a subscription to Compute! magazine). Soon realized that the programs I typed in "went away" when I turned it off. After much pleading my parents bought me a cassette tape player along with several books on BASIC. I could now save my programs, (in about 5-10min/same to load). About a year later an enlightened me bought a 5 1/4" disk drive which cut the time to seconds as well as an Atari 130XE which had enough memory to create a ram drive and was delighted with the speed. Soon an uncle of mine brought over a "doubler" chip which doubled the speed and capacity after he soldered it in. 180K - 360K per side of the disk. Loved those early '80s when I was "go-to guy" and most tech savvy in town with a 300 baud modem, dot matrix printer & 100s of programs... Anyone else remember those days?
Is that 0.3k?! Jeez, my first was a 33.6k modem. Many friends had the 28.8k(?) still. I was king once I upgraded to 56k and could download mp3s in a matter of minutes with speeds up to 4.7kb a second!
It is incredibly business-brained to call the hard drive a "graveyard of profits" the internet would be a shadow of itself without it. The knowledge saved and shared by hard drives has been simply a priceless boon to humanity and all the people who worked to delivered it are blessed.
As I recall ,the major contributor to the pollution was a nearby Fairchild Semiconductor Fab. This was discovered when there was a high degree of birth defects in the children of families who lived in a neighborhood near the fab. The Neighborhood and the fab were upstream of the IBM plant and the water moved downstream through the aquifer toward the San Francisco Bay. Rather than fight with the government over whose fault it was, IBM drilled lots of wells to analyze the type and concentration of chemicals in the aquifer and took remediation steps while they owned the property. 1982_02_28-At-Fairchild-new-reports-of-toxic-leaks-San-Jose-Mercury-Susan-Yoshum
This brings back a lot of memories. In the 1980s and 90s I worked as a technician setting up PCs (clones). It was amazing to see how fast the capacity of the hard drives grew every year. 10M 20M 40M 80M 200M 500M 1G etc. 🙂👍
Incredible how a technology that's still more complex to produce than practically 95% of the stuff we use daily is mostly considered obsolete because how it belongs to an industry where everything is cutting edge in technology.
A tub file was a fixture to store cards that can be available to the office workers. I worked in an office section at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from 1970 until 1973, and that is where I saw the blue file holders made by Diebold. The 1970s beginning was a time when data would be stored from conventional cards and paper to punch cards, tapes, and inside the computer systems. Today, my Dell OptiPlex microcomputer contains a solid state drive with a storage capacity of 2 terabytes, right in the privacy of my home. Meanwhile, I cannot get enough of big data storage.
My first PC was an IBM Clone Cordata 286 with two 5.25 inch floppy drives. The Hard drive option was quite expensive back in 1988 so I had to switch from DOS to my applications,ah you bought back some nostalgia there!.😉
Great video! I built my first PC in 2000 and few years later started using the WD Raptor drives and used them in various sizes until SSDs took over. If anyone from WD sees this I gotta say thank you! Fast, reliable drives served me well for decades
I remember when my dad got our first 1 gb HDD for our family PC, I think it was sometime in the latter half of the 90’s, maybe 97 or 98. What a time to be alive. It was a seagate.
I remember our family upgrading from a 4 GB HDD to a 20 GB Maxtor HDD in the ~Win98 era. A 5x increase; astounding! "Surely we'd never create enough documents or install enough programs to fill this up!" ClipArt libraries were on CDs!
As an avid keyboard specialist, computer user and fan, since I first tried the IBM PC in 1988 during training, I am still fascinated with the hard disk drive as a storage part of a microcomputer. That is the reason I would prefer the IBM PC-XT over the IBM PC. Today, in the year 2024, I have a Dell OptiPlex All-In-One 7410 Plus that has an integrated circuit called "solid state drive," hence SSD. Your topic was made especially for me to arouse my appreciation for the microcomputer. I will not want to look backward, let alone to the typewriter. I believe that Seagate made the best hard disks. I had one in my first microcomputer which was Cybernet that I purchased in 2002. I hope to see more of your stories about microcomputer technology. You made this story just for me.
Fascinating story. Some ways that I have intersected with it. I remember seeing the IBM disk packs being used in our university's computer centre in the late 1970s (no PCs in those days), and then built a copy of the university's in-house CPM-based computers which boasted an 8" floppy disk drive (cost me AUD$500 in the 1980s). In the late 1980s I installed a 10MB HDD in a PC of a professor, thinking "Why does anyone need that much storage space?".
Well researched video with photos only. It looks boring but its not. The dictionof the voice over is remarkable in such a way you want to continue watching this humble video. Well done.
I beg to differ my friend. With enormous home digital movie collections, in particular with the popularity of home NAS systems, the HDD is the only means possible. Every server and commercial data centers thrive on them. Imho, the HDD is on the rise!👍
People will say stuff like "hdds are so out! Why would you buy an SSD?" and then they keep all their data "in the cloud" which is literally a big data centre full of hdds! 😂
Yep, I would love to get alternatives like Ultrium 9 drives for my private backupping needs but they are simply far too expensive. HDDs will have the best price per TB ratio for a long time if you don't have to back up petabytes. Also SSDs and backups don't mix. I got >40TB plus redundancy in HDD storage and running out of space again. Would cost me maybe 1500 in total at the moment, if I would buy new HDDs (sadly prices went up since last year). An external Ultrium 9 drive is 3800 Euros. A single 15.36 TB Kioxia SSD is 2000+ Euros.
I bought a 16TB disk last year and it contains all my multimedia for easy access. No need to use an SSD for those kinds of speeds. HDDs are probably better for long term storage than SSDs also, since SSDs still need some electric power with intervals depending on the specific SSD.
Great video, thanks! Another small bit of history: Ampex, an important company in magnetic storage and its use in the video industry. During my years in San Jose I had an elderly colleague who had previously worked in an R&D lab at Ampex in the 60's when they were developing a washing machine sized hard drive. He told a story about how they kept tripping on power cords which would destroy the read/write heads scratched the platters as the beast spun down. So they designed a huge solenoid to yank the arms out if the power was lost - good job, problem solved. Except... A few weeks later, the power cord was again yanked out by accident, causing the hard drive arms to retract while another engineer's arm was inside the machine! The poor guy lost part of a finger! It's amazing to consider that these technolgoies originated as washing machine sized objects that people used wrenches, drills and hammers on. :-D And as such, posed certain health safety risks!
Great video! I purchased my first hard disk, a 40 MB Maxtor 8051A in 1990, at a cost of approximately $1,500. I can't say exactly when I switched to SSD's, but the end of the HD era came to a very sudden halt for me. But hats off to the line of inventors and engineers who kept them progressing and lasting for so many years.
I got the first BASF 10 MB "Winchester" hard drive and also received an offer to work at Miniscribe as an electrical engineer. Declined the offer and worked for another company that made BSR X-10 systems.
I just bought two more 18 Terabyte HDD's yesterday..... I assure you the hard drive market is alive and well, as it will be likely for "decades" to come! Until the cost per TB on any other storage tech can closely match that of hard drives, the old tried and true spinning disk will remain supreme leader of the pack for long term bulk storage in mass quantity. Cheers 🍻
Yeah, but it's data hoarders and data centers only. Whereas before every PC/notebook had an HDD. I have no idea how this translates to market figures, but still a significant consumer base loss for a low-margin business. PS I work at a PC parts distributor and can say that for quite some time, HDD sales are far from what they used to be, compared to ssds. At least in our country.
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul: I'm just backing up movies, so far 120 TB worth and counting..... I'm certainly not hoarding, it is my exact intention to give it all away before I die. I just don't know how to do that, exactly. I need massive amounts of storage that none of these SSD's can provide, let alone provide it affordably. I'm looking forward to the day when they can, but I see it at least a decade away minimum. In the meantime, any idea how to give away over a 100 TB of movies and TV shows?
@@Finite-Tuning the only practical way I see is to transfer the NAS/server containing the storage your media is on to the beneficiary. Anything else would be too much hassle. Unless you absolutely want to take it with you on your trip to the pyramid
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul: Yes exactly, practical with least amount of hassle has been my two main problems to overcome. Maybe the internet archive? Most of what I have are exact 1:1 ISO files, not some compressed streaming crap, and to in multiple versions. Giving it all to 1 that has no idea what it is or how to use it would be a slow painful death. I want the world to have it or at least have access to it in a way that cannot be shut down.
@@Finite-Tuning t0rrent is the optimal way to share stuff with many. However, for it to be successful, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. For it to be usable, it has to be catalogued, supplied with something like nfo files with relevant metadata (tinymediamanager is the way to do this), and posted on a good tr@ckēr with a good description. Also, legal issues may apply. All that takes quite some effort. So if you really want it but don't feel like doing all that the only way is to find somebody who is ready to. Also, if it's movies or other media works, those may have already been shared, and often in much better quality than one can find on DVDs if that's the medium in question. Think blueray rēmuxes and open matte versions.
There was also the curious story of Micropolis, a struggling hard disk manufacturer. Let's start with the end-- investigators found a recipt in the Micropolis files-- a receipt for $400 worth of house bricks. It turned out Micropolis had been shipping thousands of boxes of "hard disks" to their warehouse and logging them as sold hard disks in order to push up their sales numbers. It turns out it was a scheme to ship bricks in hard disk boxes to inventory in order to make their sales numbers look better.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force to move the heads quickly is the same physics as in the older linear voice coil actuator. But many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, in 1987, and that 10 MB capacity seemed enormous. But it was _S L O W!_ Then came multimedia and internet... For several years starting in 1996, I had to double my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various _much faster_ HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
A bigger difference to multimedia on PC was the CD drive. You didn't need a lot of space on the drive, you could do a minimal install and the computer would get just about all data needed from the CD. This wasn't optimal, and I had nice computers back then, but the storage capacity of your hard drive was not key to your multimedia usage. Unless of course you were some weirdo that didn't have a CD drive by 1995.
Hard Disk are bot disappearing any time soon - they are still the best price/performance option for data archiving and are regularly used by cloud storage providers to service things like youtube, cloud storage etc. This video is probably hosted on a raid array on hard drives some where. Though they are no longer popular on individual computers, people still use them every day through cloud services.
Exactly what I was going to say. I have a media array for plex/jellyfin and the cost effectiveness just isn't even remotely there for SSDs, especially when you don't need high speed random access.
People don't care about that when the cost is already so low of better options. Who the hell would get an HDD when SDDs are only marginally more expensive? HDDs are an option in the third world, that's about it.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 For archival storage and for large volume cloud storage - try to get a 20TB drive in SSD for anything close to the price of a HDD. For large capacities HDD is still WAY cheaper.
@@incumbentvinyl9291you obviously don't store any significant amount of data locally, then. SSD are many times more expensive per TB than HDD. If you only need 1TB of storage for your operating system and a few games, yeah obviously an SSD is the best choice. If you're storing 100TB of data then you'll pay a fortune for SSD and it will be completely wasteful because it's fast when it doesn't need to be. Oh, you're storing all your data in the cloud? Guess what, Dropbox is storing your data on an array of HDDs.
Excellent telling of the story. One thing I remember as a significant, but short-lived bump was IBM's RPS (Rotational Position Sensing) technology. RPS allowed a disk controller to request a record from somewhere, then do something else while the disk rotated around to bring the record into position and read it. The predecessor to RPS was the special-order "airline buffer" that did the same thing electronically.
Great video. Thanks for a trip down memory lane. I was only in the industry for 5 years from 1995 to 2000. But there were lots of old-timers that regailed me with much of the same stories. But, by the time I got started, it was a mad rush off the cliff and the end of days was inevitable.
Conner Peripherals shocked the industry back in the late 1980's when they introduced a drive with the disk controller integrated into the drive itself (IDE interface), which led the way to parallel ATA. I believe it was 40Mbytes.
i think their first one was 20meg - CP3022 - I worked at Olivetti at the time as was blown away when we say it. All the other names were a trip down memory lane. Some of them were famously unreliable - Olivetti’s own OPE disk were always back for repair along with miniscribes - NEC’s were very reliable and sought after. Maxtors were generally ok and Micropolis too
@@eliotmansfield I'm pretty sure that Connor introduced both the 20 AND the 40 at the same time. I want to say there was a larger drive in the same series introduced a month or two later?
@@eliotmansfield Olivetti. The hard drive sandwich company. A 5.25 drive, sandwiched between two pieces of plywood and stuffed into a box with poly foam.
@13:10 That looks like my old Maxtor drive. I ran a computer bulletin board in the early 90's on a 286/12, 16meg ram with a Maxtor xt1140 140 meg MFM, debugged in Rll to 205megs. Southern Fried BBS running Maximus on OS/2 out of Naples Florida.
Finally, after all those years now I know why HDD called Winchester. 🤯
My mechanical engineer dad used to work at R&D division of Maxtor (now acquired by Seagate) in Singapore during the 90s. He used to work on development of technologies to minimize the turbulence and vibration of the head caused by the spinning disks. Fluid mechanics was his specialization. He used to bring defective hard drives at home to show us, we used to play with them, lol. After the acquisition, he got laid off then started to teach at a university as a professor and used to use those defective hard drives as demos in his fluid mechanics classes. This video brought up those memories. Thanks. RIP dad.
Sounded like a very knowledgeable Dad! RIP.
RIP Dads.
Now we know who to blame....
Great story about Maxtor -- Jim Patterson (I think) worked at Shugart and wanted to build a 4 platter 5 1/4" drive with the idea of going higher to increase capacity (hence the name Maxtor). His boss at Shugart said it couldn't be done without an outboard bearing and that would make the drive too large. So Jim left and founded Maxtor. I think the largest drive they intro'd had 8 platters. Just another nail in Shugart's coffin.
@@mikek1681 Interesting story. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting video... I spent virtually my entire engineering career in the data storage biz... Started in the '70s when discs were big and brown, storing tens of megabytes... and finished a few years ago developing terabyte SSDs the size of a pack of gum. Worked at many of the big names and even a few of the startups lost along the way. The pace of development was always intense... and during the time the industry was transitioning its manufacturing offshore I spent a lot of time on 747s supporting Asian operations. Lots of highs and lows along the way... it was a heck of a ride... but happily out and retired... gone fishing.
Words cannot express how much I envy you for your experience. People like you literally changed history.
@@InhalingWeaselgo into IT, the tremendous pace of inventing is still there, albeit not in "spinning rust" department anymore.
Yeah, heat assisted is the last kick before settling back.
@@DoeJohn3rd Already there. Couldn't cut it as a developer or engineer so I went for data analytics to pay the bills. But I always loved poking around old hardware and never had the heart to throw any of my old PCs.
I remembered a school visit to an IBM office during the 1980s and seeing large washing machine size disk drives. Long forgotten how much data those could store but would've been pitifully small compared to what we have now.
That's crazy, back in those days operating systems were measured in kilobytes
Late 80's, a friend worked as a product manager for a hard disk company. He remarked one time, "Selling hard disks is a lot like selling fish. You only have so much time to move the product."
sniff sniff
week-old winchester
@@crackwitz *literal pile of putrid rotting seagate drives* I think I also see some rancid RAM.
It was true, but there's a physical limit to reducing size on a platter. The rate of increase in storage has slowed a lot since the mid-2010s, the last five years seeing 2TB as most common high end replaced by 4TB. Multiple and stacked SSDs may be the only way to bring 50TB and 100TB into common use.
I mean, you can't freeze HDDs for later usage, so I'd say you actually have a bit less time to sell HDDs than you have to sell fish... you really got to do it while the HDD is still fresh!
I worked in a computer shop in the early 90s and the analogy I used was a vegetable stand. The shop was always ordering too much inventory and I tried to explain to him that the stuff was essentially "rotting" on our shelves because everything becomes obsolete. Except for VGA cables. lol
Correction: I was mistaken. The Winchester name did not come from the head actuator. I stand corrected. Should I delete the next paragraph?
The Winchester name also comes from the head actuator action. Prior to the IBM 3340 the head actuators were based on voice coils to move the head in and out. A voice coil like a speaker uses. The Winchester actuator rotates the head assembly around a pivot point with a horizontal magnetic coil on the opposite end. This rotating action is similar to the lever action of a Winchester rifle. The Winchester action allowed the actuator assembly to be much more compact and had better head positioning precision. This is the head actuator design still used today.
An interesting story is that my father Jack Harker was managing the Winchester project. At one point the project faced serious problems taking it from the lab to manufacturing. The problems were so severe Jack was considering pulling the plug on the project. At a meeting he made the offhand comment "If the team can make this work, I will walk on water." Needless to say, the problems were solved. IBM San Jose had reflecting pond with a tetrahedral sculpture that would twist in the wind. Jack had platforms built that were sunk a half inch under the water. With the launch of the 3340, there are pictures of him "walking on water" and kicking the surface of the water to make a spray. A nod to the hard work of the lab and manufacturing teams overcoming their obstacles.
My father never mentioned the 30/30 naming story. He always said that the name came from the leaver action of the Winchester rifle.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_
To think, the hard disk drive almost had a cool name
So cool. Thanks for posting this. For other readers, look up Jack Harker and "Computer History Museum." Your dad was an important dude.
@Asianometry please pin this comment
Actually, the unique thing about the IBM 3340, and all subsequent hard drives (or "direct access storage device", "DASD" as is was called at IBM) was not the rotary actuator. That came much later. It was the fact that the heads, and the actuator that positioned them, were "parked" on the disk. This greatly simplified the actuator as the heads did not have to be carefully lowered down onto the disks when it was started up. This was achieved by putting lube on the disk so it would not stick to the disk when it was stopped, and designing the "slider" section of the head so that they "fly" close to the disk when it is spinning. Every increase in drive capacity that followed has included cleverly designed sliders that fly ever closer to the magnetic media on the disks.
Today, to accommodate heads that fly super close to the disks, the heads are unloaded like they did before 1973. So it would be incorrect to call modern hard drives "Winchester" drives.
I work at a semiconductor company that makes some of the magic that makes hard drives work. It has basically become a single source industry for some of the components (like the preamps) that sit on the read heads and basically turn noise into signals at massive rates. It is pure magic.
Thank you for being an adept in those secret arts :D
Without people like you, we'd have to go back to microfilm, or rather use flash and ssd's I guess...
I think we could have had an "internet by postcard" much earlier, through clever use of microfilm and airmail, and i'm somewhat fascinated by that alternate history.
Error Correction codes in analog to digital conversion are the precursors to backpropagation in machine learning today. Both serve the function of fixing the signal coming up. Both are magic but everybody complains that machine learning is magic and that is bad which error correction coding is good. Go figure. There is good evidence that this type of signal correction is fundamental to all neural networks of the living kind.
I remember when Seagate introduced the first drive that automatically parked the hdd using the stored rotational energy in the platters to move the heads when it detected power loss.
Yes, before _self-parking drives,_ there really were problems... Not so much with the rotary "Winchester" actuator (still referred to as a *voice coil actuator, like the older linear type)* because it can move the heads quickly, but many of the other early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a much slower and much more power-hungry *stepper motor* head actuator, outside of the sealed platter enclosure.
.
In that type of HDD, the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had *literally been a doorstop* at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! Those tracks held the critical Boot, System, FAT and File Directory. Obviously, the R/W heads spent a LOT of time hovering over those 12 outermost tracks, and they definitely suffered when the power went off, which must have been often. But there was enough space on the hub side of the platters to create 12 totally new tracks when I repositioned the entire set of tracks, via the setscrew. So the drive still had the original capacity, it just had some smaller bits and bytes near the hub. At least for that kind of old MFM drive, relocating all the tracks was not a problem: The drive lasted several more years after my Revival Hack. Then it was given away, still working perfectly!
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That was my first HDD, in 1987, and to me at that time a 10 MB capacity seemed enormous. But it was _S L O W!_ Then came multimedia and internet... For several years starting in 1996, I had to double my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various _much faster_ HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
@@YodaWhat And now I will not buy a drive smaller than 20TB 😆
Heh, I have a colossal 74Kb HDD!
@uzlonewolf Why not? Are you running a data centre?
Actually, the key for the industry HDD was not ST-506 [as all ignoramuses keep saying], but ST-412 with its ST-412 MFM revolutionary new interface! Shame on all these ignoramuses, who are able only to "judge a book by its cover" - by an external outlook...
My brother worked at Seagate, and would bring hope defective drives that were just thrown into the trash. We'd play with the magnets and platters. This was before you could just buy neodymium magnets on the internet, so I had the coolest show&tells at school. Plus lots of blood blisters...
In the early days, the 'supermagnets' in HDDs were often the Samarium-Cobalt type, which can operate at higher temperatures, and are slightly radioactive thanks to the Samarium.
@@YodaWhat
awesome, i'll have to check my older hdd's 😅
I took apart a huge, older 5.25 inch hdd in ~2010.
It had two "45 degree cylinder shell segment segment" magnets (two inches tall, ~3/8" thick, about 1.5" wide) for actuation, and a ~ 10-15 disk stack.
I had blood blisters from those magnets, too.
Shitgate is more suiting name for this crapppy ass company
My mechanical engineer dad used to work at R&D division of Maxtor (now acquired by Seagate) in Singapore during the 90s. He used to work on development of technologies to minimize the turbulence and vibration of the head created by the spinning plates. Fluid mechanics was his specialization. He also used to bring defective hard drives at home to show us, we used to play with them, lol. After the acquisition, he got laid off then started to teach at a university as a professor and used to use those defective hard drives as demos in his fluid mechanics classes. This video brought up those memories. RIP dad.
Ah yes, the supermagnet blood blisters haha. Something I know all too well. Although I'm 25, so I was a kid when they became very easily accessible online
Interesting fact not mentioned here: the tiny 1.8" hard drives used in the early iPods were not actually the smallest ones produced. There was, from 1998 to 2006, a line of truly miniature hard drives that fit into a Compact Flash card form factor, ranging in size from a few hundred megabytes up to a few gigabytes at the largest.
I have one CF HD still installed in my Commodore Amiga A1200, I think it's 5GB. Still works fine.
Yep, the IBM (later Hitachi) Microdrive!
there was even smaller hdd made for Nokia n92
One Ipaq used it too. But Apple will be always the first
@@38911bytefree except it wasn't.
Such great content! In the 90's there was at least one adjacent worksite between Maxtor and Seagate (in Longmont Colorado which is close to Boulder that I sometimes see in videos). In the late 90's I worked at one of them on their pilot line. There were some couples with one spouse working for Seagate, and the other spouse working for Maxtor, which I thought was interesting. I even heard one guy pretended to "steal" his wife's car when he took visitors to lunch in order to try to show thriftiness vs. the other companies lavishness that their employees can afford nice cars. I wonder if the visitors bought any of it.
stayed in Mn next to the Seagate factory, it sits on the aptly named "Disk Drive".
The Seagate facilities in MN were originally built by Control Data Corp. As CDC was slowly dismantled and its parts sold off in the 1980s, Seagate bought the disk drive division from CDC. I think it had originally been called Imprimis and was a joint venture with Honeywell. I think the two current Seagate buildings in MN, one in Bloomington, the other in Shakopee, were built by Seagate.
Seagate built a research and development center here in Pittsburgh in conjunction with CMU university in 2000 . It shut down a few years ago unfortunately .
The original Disc Drive is in Scotts Valley, California, about five miles from where I live. I worked for Atasi, one of the other disk drive companies that started at about the same time.
@@pscheie I worked for CDC/Magnetic Peripherals/Imprimis/Seagate (same company) in engineering and management for about 28 years. Started as an intern in college. It was a wild ride. There is incredible technology in a disc drive, most people have no idea. I was a survivor for a long time but eventually got the axe in a RIF (Reduction in Force). Severance was great and I needed to move on anyway. I got to have some input into the planning for the Shakopee facility, nicest place I ever worked. Hardest part of management was terminating people when the inevitable down turns came. Employees that I had hired into my department, many with over 30 years of service.
Hey Gene! MDW finally matured to the point they didn't need us anymore so we went into R&D then got sold to Luminar. Layoff there in early April so I'm retired now. For you other folks out there, Gene and I worked at MPI which became Imprimis and then Seagate. Seagate was a garage shop when it bought Imprimis in '90. Seagate was mote or less assimilated by Imprimus so the Seagate stuff in here is pretty worthless. We were way beyond Seagate. We worked in the servo track writer area under Dick Yonke and Bill Roling. Originally hard drives had one servo disk that defined where the heads should go but when Cuda 11 came out the servo was embedded on all surfaces to compensate for thermal growth. We found that squeezing the bearing shafts during STW (servo track writing) tightened up the bearings and improved the metrics. John Runyon optimized the optical feedback system for it. Genes group built hundreds of those things. Each writing one drive at a time. As the TPI increased it took longer and longer to do and the bearings and laser interferometer was having more and more challenges along with the limitations of the vibrating drive structure. Then while evaluating single disc's written on Brent Weichelts' single disk tester I had an idea. I went to Bill and suggested we try stacking disks and writing them outside of the drive then install them like how Barb Madge and I did for prototype drives. Lon Buske, Brent. Rodney Dahlenburg, Roger Karau and Ralph Hilla built a demo and the sucker actually worked and allowed us to go over 100 ktpi. The next few years under Louis Boman with assistance from Xyratex and Professional Instruments, and Brenk Brothers Inc we developed the device and installed 6000 of them in California and then into Singapore. These devices are still in operation. The air bearing spindles from PI have an nrro of 12 nano inches so they have a way to go. @genethompson8764
I recall in the early days of the PC revolution, when the 20MB hard drive came out and I thought to myself... "I'll never fill that thing up."
[Also note Robert Harker's post just below. His post is very important.]
Mine cost $1000.
Thought I was the coolest guy in the city. 🙄
I still have my first XT clone. Well, and XT clone, after I added a 20MB Seagate HD, with its associate full length MFM interface card. Used it for quite a while, as I later added a 24 channel logic analyzer card, so that PC was just used a piece of test gear.
I saw an episode of computer chronicles where they referred to a 40mb drive as huge!
@@michaelmoorrees3585 you've got a piece of artwork. Could maybe sell for big $$$$. What I regret most was throwing my IBM/clone keyboards away. Today, we type on chiclets. Heavy sigh.
@@hangdog7094 Right. Me, too.
That was your best one since the ATI video! Thanks! On a side note, my first HDD was a Supra 20MB drive for the Commodore Amiga 500 in about 1987. A 2-part beast of a drive that was basically two shoe boxes. One to connect to the motherboard, then a massive cable that ran to the other shoebox that held the drive which I placed about 12” higher than the computer up on my bureau. Had to manually park heads before touching it to move it. It was glorious.
My first was also a 20MB for my Amiga 2000. A buddy of mine had the A500 and side slot hard drive.
A practical 4 megabyte memory in 1956 really was a revolution. The computer "Colossus" built in the early 1940s by the UK's Post Office Research Station had a memory of a few hundred bits, implemented by thyratrons. These are a type of vacuum tube (called a valve in the UK; also the thyratron shouldn't really be called a vacuum tube because it has mercury vapour in it) that once signalled into conduction continues to conduct until the current is stopped by some external cause. Each of them needs about one watt to heat the cathode to keep the thyratron working. This means that 4 megabytes implemented by thyratrons would have 32 million of them and would consume tens of megawatts of electricity, the failure of which would cause the memory to forget everything that is in it.
Now we take for granted that we can have hundreds of gigabytes of memory on something the size of our little finger nails and costing a few dollars.
Now we have 10K or 100K HDDs, each 20TB+, in HA clusters in datacenters...
Colossus was not a classical von Neuman binary computer. It was bi-quinary. This means it was a simplified decimal system but instead of 10 tubes to represent 0 to 10 it used 6 (a binary one would use 8 in a flip flop config). Using ring counters saved tubes and avoided more complex logic (as decatron and trocotron were not yet invented). But it hasn't memory in the classical sense, it basically simulated the Lorenz machine with ring counters with a more logic added to control.
My Dad worked for the UK Post Office, and I remember him telling me that his team had acquired a "Winchester Drive" (no mention of an attached computer). This allowed them to record the number and duration of phone calls across the UK, and decide where to build new lines and allocate new phone handsets
Wasn't that Tommy Flowers' machine?
@@vulpo Yes.
I was a five year old child in the IBM lab on Santa Clara Street during weekends in 1960. It is pronounced RAM MAC, not RayMac. The heads don't fly because of wobble, they fly with compressed air at the head to keep the distance constant and be immune from folks bumping into the drive. When the heads were first designed they would fly but easily crashed into the surface wrecking the magnetic surface when someone walked by. My father developed the idea of using a wing to force the head against a bubble of air and these forces self regulated as the heads became closer to the disc. The original drive was a spinning drum looked not unlike a spinning garbage can. Disc platters was an innovation. The name Winchester comes from the mystery house not the gun. The project name became the product name when they came up with the idea of 30-30 to overcome the objection of T. Watson Jr. Al Shugart, Amdahl, and others all came out of San Jose. Shugart is most famous for making non compete clauses illegal in California by bringing an 1862 law back to life in a case against Zerox v. Shugart.
I once worked on a Bendix G-15 - the drum was it's MAIN memory.
Wasn't a new machine when I worked on it.
The thin film heads on the 3380 “flew” due to the configuration of the “rails” on the slider (head) with some appropriate downward force from the suspension. In the beginning IBM tested the fly height on both sides of the head (the rails). The heads were very aerodynamically simple. Source of information, worked as an engineer on the fly height testers.
18:55 - the anti-static lab coats didn't have wires, but carbon-impregnated threads, conductive enough to dissipate static, but not enough to create a shock hazard. Similarly, grounding straps have ~1 Meg-ohm resistors in series so your body isn't subjected to high currents if you grab a live wire.
Starting my data processing business, I made sure every computer I bought had TWO hard drives, I would read from one, write to the other as I ran my data through various steps. This really helped the throughput
That's a nice trick, I always did that when I had to move virtual machines, you move them to another array with different disks, so you don't bog down the transfer forcing random access instead of sequential access.
So.... you bought tape drives?
I also have two drives in every computer, but for a different reason... I run them in RAID-1 configuration so if a drive goes bad, I don't lose data. I just swap in a replacement and let the RAID array rebuild itself.
@@RonJohn63well the tape drive is purely sequential access with enormous seek penalties, a hard drive is better for sequential access but the odd random seek isn't a huge penalty.
I allways think of that "raid is not backup" meme pic, with a burned out computer.
But it works for your use case, of course.
At a trade show in the early ‘80s I saw a large number of terminals connected to a base with a hard drive. I asked the spokesman “You mean all of these terminals are fighting to use this one hard drive?” He replied “We prefer to call it ‘sharing’.”
all that has changed for these beasts is their capacity has gone through the roof these days😲
Terminals were also fighting for the CPU.
Yes, it's amusing to think that organizations had dozens or hundreds of people competing for use of a single hard drive on the network which could do maybe 100-250 IOPS. Now a cheap laptop has an SSD that can do 250K IOPS
long live the hard disk drive muhahahahahahaha they still can hold a bloody ton of data and outlast the ssd when it comes to data write cycles
In South Africa, we called the 3.5" diskettes Stiffies, and I could not understand why our American supplier ladies laughed so much without telling me why.
I remember my boss getting really offended when I told the German engineer that our drive could not read his stiffy :-)
so you walked around telling people you had a 3.5" stiffy... wow. Hope you didn't say that out loud in a bar.
I remember hearing that term at a business meeting in Zimbabwe when a female vendor from South Africa was asked for a copy of the PowerPoint presentation she had just presented. She turned to him and said "Give me a stiffy". We Americans had no clue what she was really talking about and burst out laughing. LOL.
Bahaha “stiffies”!!! that’s awesome!! 😂
Be careful what you ask for!!!😂🤣😂🤣
You missed a whole generation of hard disks. Check out Bryant disks drives. Bryant was head quartered in Detroit MI. The disks were 36 in. in diameter. The drives were massive required a huge 220 Volt motor to spine them. The motor was coupled to the disks with 6 drive belts and pullies. The heads actuator was driven by hydraulics. The disk housing was about 4 ft high, 5 ft. wide 5 ft. deep. The dive motor, hydraulic pump, and AC unit was in a separate housing. The whole floor of the computer room would shake when the heads moved. The whole drive only held 64k of data.
Did CDC use these?
Bryant also manufactured "magnetic drums". The floating heads were fixed in place, but switched electrically. There were spare heads to replace "crashed " and consequently, damaged tracks. The drums required almost a "clean room" environment to keep the drums running reliably . But, they were almost silent when running. I worked as a "peripheral test tech" at CDC in St Paul, MN in the late '60s. All of these "peripherals" required a "controller" to interface with a PPU ( peripheral processor unit) which would interface with the CPU. Ah, the "good old days" when a computer system REQUIRED a room full of equipment!!!
@@dwainsims3065 YES! They were called "disk files" at CDC. We ran these machines continuously for 24hrs before shipping them!
Wonderful analysis. Brings back fond memories.
I was there at IBM for the transition from ink disks to Thin Film Disks. The first thin film disks were aluminum/magnesium disks coated with 10 microns of electroless nickel phosphorous plating. The nickel plating was nonmagnetic and amorphous. So it was the perfect substrate for the magnetic film. The amorphous NiP plating allowed it to be chemically mechanically polished to an atomic finish. My first attempt at a magnetic film was an electroless plated cobalt phosphorus plating. 11 Megabits/square inch!! World Record for two weeks! In the blink of a young girl's eye came sputter coating with Cobalt Platinum Tantalum Chrome. Passed me bye. Can't plate that alloy. So, then, cover the sputter layer with a sputtered layer of Diamond Like Carbon and fluoro-lube and Voila! You have the thin film disk.
Add a thin film (plated) head to it and let fly! Damn, that was a glorious process!
Weirdly, I was thinking idly about sputtering processes the other day, just an interest, not a professional connection.
I was testing those disc's at Imprimis with glide heads and comparing them to the new FSD3 disks. The IBM disks were far smoother. One day Tom Murnan came down to the lab exclaiming how we had just made the ultimate thin film disc's and could I please test them with the heads that Harold Beecroft had designed. I put them on the tester and " b'ding, ding,ding...." ! They had forgotten to take the plastic wrap off of the oven heaters before they cured the lube! The disks were covered in little plastic bumps. He was so mad.
Instead of a HDD, I spent my money on a SoundBlaster (TM), and was the first kid in the village to have proper PC sound. That really impressed all the other nerds around me (2 or 3).
lol That's nothing. I bought a card that enabled my PC to send a fax. I used in once and impressed myself before trashing it. :)
woah woah - 8bit sound?
I was one of those kids you hated because they had a Voodoo SLI. 🤣
SoundBlaster was game changer..
Then came 3dfx and Voodoo with OpenGL which completely flippped the table over again and then some, until Nvidia realized SLI was too powerful that they could not even fix it and EOL'd it from gaming history.
I spent just over 3k in my junior year of college (in '95) on a higher end Dell pentium. Sound blaster sound, probably 2GB memory and probably something like a 20 or 30 GB hdd. Don't remember the exact specs but windows 95 was impressive back then.
Sadly in about 5 years all this was ancient tech and the cost of a rig with much better specs was significantly cheaper.😢
Kinda wished that i had kept it.
@@chris2790 in '95 having a 2gb HDD was high end. 2gb ram was not avail to average consumers
The big IBM disk packs were great. I modified an old one to be a "Cake Dome". I would bring donuts in for the IT staff and place them under the plastic dome. This was great fun but eventually, the younger IT staff didn't even know the dome was from.
Excellent - straight to the point, no waffle and truly groundbreaking use of music. Excellent- thank you.
Thanks for the passing reference to Priam.... I worked for them in the 80's, at their repair centre in Reading, UK.... We were selling 14", 8", and eventually 5 1/4 inch Winchester drives.... I remember them releasing a full height 5 1/4 inch drive boasting a whole 760Mb, and thinking it was a massive breakthrough.... Totally outgunned by Seagate etc, and the company folded just after I left....
Very cool! Priam did sell a few 3.5" drives very late in their life, but they are hideously rare. To this day I've never personally seen even a photo of one.
Great story. I was a VC back in the 1980's and financed both Seagate and Connor. It was a wild ride. MiniScribe was particularly interesting to watch as, under intense pressure to grow revenue, they started shipping bricks in packaging that looked like a disk drive to inventory and claiming it as revenue - ultimately they were caught and a huge class action suit ensued taking down some of the BOD members for failing to provide governance. Another side story worth tuning into was the read/write optical disc category. Thanks for doing this - it brought back some interesting memories.
I made $$ via the ups/downs of Seagate, but lost a bunch when Miniscribe failed. Those years of competition were fierce. Miniscribe had decent reliably suggesting solid QA but couldn't get volume to meet selling margins. I imagine every maker struggling with QA issues vs volume of complex assemblies. Brutal competition in the marketplace..
I can add a bit more color. I was a partner with the Hambrecht & Quist VC group when Bill Hambrecht did the MiniScribe deal and went on the BOD. All of us at H&Q worked independently then, so I had no direct involvement in that deal or even knowledge of it until it happened. In fact, I offered financing to Finis Connor, and that was yet another wild ride. But when Bil Hambrecht brought in QT Wiles to be Chairman of H&Q Inc. and he started his autocratic BS, I decided to leave, joining Oak Investment Partners in 1986. It didn't take long for H&Q to fail after that.
The whole MiniScribe fiasco blew up after I left H&Q but that didn't stop the class action lawyers from naming all 21 partners who were in the H&Q VC group at the time the deal was done as co-defendants in the action. It took some wrangling but all except Bill himself were dismissed from the suit. I know QT ended up in prison and a $250M fine, and that Bill was required to pay a substantial sum, as were others. A classic story of how an entire organization evolve into unethical practices when the autocratic CEO is relentlessly demanding. I always thought QT was a shill - an arrogant poser who had a lot of people fooled.
@@David_Best Had no idea that the VC firm might get sued. I never got much from the suit, like most investors - lawyers gain, we don't. I just am sad that so many had to be involved in the deception. A period of wild competition but a lot of technical progress. As a small time PC builder, profits were consumed by inventory - scale and inventory turns were the path to survival as the PC became a commodity. Heady times.
@@hardeehodges326 Just to be clear, the suit targeted the partners in the VC partnership directly - not the partnership, but the individuals. So a lot of anxiety as all 21 of us could have or net wroth extinguished. I have heard that BIll Hambrecht lost half of his wealth in the settlement, 40 percent of which went to the lawyers.
I wouldn’t suggest that it is bust. For mass storage at reasonable prices it is still king.
SSD'S ARE SO MUCH MORE RELIABLE!!! I HAVE NOT HAD ANY CRASHES IN ANY OF MY CUSTOMERS MACHINES THAT I HAVE INSTALLED SSD'S IN. EVERY TIME YOU RUN
SCANDISK YOU WILL SEE ERRORS AND MULTIPLE CRASHED DRIVES IN HDD'S PER YEAR.
AND PRICES FOR SSD ARE ALMOST EQUAL OR LESS THAN HDD'S. EVERY UPGRADE
TO I HAVE DONE IN THE LAST YEAR HAS BEEN AN SSD. IN 2 OR 3 YEARS ALL HDDS
WILL BE OUT OF PRODUCTION AND REPLACED BY SSD'S.
@@computerpro123abc So you think in 2 or 3 years 20+ TB SSD's are going to be available? lmao
@@computerpro123abc I have 16 HDD in my NAS server, they've been running for YEARS, no issues. Granted they're enterprise grade drives. I've had issues with SSD's though, they wear out with time too. I think the high failure rates are because consumer HDD's are garbage, but that doesn't mean all HDD's are going to be replaced. There still is no affordable option for the amount of storage I have if I switch to SSD's.
@@Psilobite Technically they already exist, but mainly for the server market. It turns out you can buy a 30TB SSD on newegg for $5000+
There's a PCIe board that supports 4 NVMe drives and if you had money to burn you could put 4 $800 8TB NVMe drives on it and call it 32TB. HDDs are obviously cheaper, but they've been about the same price for a decade, so SSD is likely to surpass it soon.
@@computerpro123abc Bud, I have 40 year old hard disks with no bad sectors that work, and flash memory that failed after only a decade. I work in IT, I see a lot of failures on flash memory type devices.
Also, stop yelling, you're coming across as an angry 12 year old Internet user from the early 2000s.
I'll never forget holding a 7500rpm IBM Deskstar drive in my hand while it was fully connected and spun-up. Something suddenly went wrong and the drive launched from my hand and flew 15 feet accross the room. I gained renewed respect for what was going on inside that shiny metal case!
😭🤣🤣😭😂🤣😭🤣😭😭
similar here
I heard form somewhere that because of the high failure rates those were called Deathstars :)
When stiction was a thing.
@@mrtechie6810 Stiction was mostly Seagate in the era of the ST251, the ST277R RLL version, and the ST296N SCSI version (I had a ST296N for a while but it was on my BBS, never got shut down, so never had it "stick"). I don't remember if they made a ESDI version of that drive mechanism.
Also affected some ST225/ST238R drives at the time.
What a great watch! Thanks for putting this together, man - excellent work.
10:50 7200 RPM was for the most common HDDS but there were also 10k and 15k RPMS for low latency applications (servers).
10k rpm and 15k rpm seem to be limited to 2.5" hard drives, from what I've seen.
@@bricefleckenstein9666Original Veloci-Raptors were 3.5 inch 15K rpm drives. They later downsized them to 2.5s in a 3.5 heatsink. I still have two brand new 150GB velociraptors that were spares for a raid 10 array.
@@bricefleckenstein9666they where initially 3.5” drives, they just used 2.5” (or 2”) platters inside.
@@thegeforce6625 May have been 3.5 outline, but they would have been 2.5" drives then.
Hybrid setups like that are always confusing though.
I remember the days when I had to use a park command to park the HDD heads before shutting down the computer. If I forgot, data loss and damage to the platters was a really expensive reminder.
I remember using the park command in msdos
@@ianhosier4042 That's right. by the time that Windows was a thing, hard disks parked themselves automatically.
You typed 'park' into DOS and it printed out a banner that said "parkal". I never figured out why.
@@capella5783 As explained in the video, with modern hard drives, they use the momentum of the platters as they spin down to park the heads. Back in the early 80's everyone that didn't want their hard drives to crash the first time the power was interrupted had a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) between the wall outlet and their computer.
And you are correct that I can unplug or turn the power off at the breaker and it will not effect my computer at all. that's because my laptop has a built-in uninterruptible power supply. And yes, I do use the shut-down menu when I turn it off. From the desktop press Alt+F4 to open the shutdown menu.
At 18:57, the "Seagate uniform" doesn't dissipate static. It's designed to NOT produce any electrostatic discharge. Wearing static discharge shoes or a static strap connected to a ground does that. The jacket merely acts as a Faraday cage preventing any of the static generated by the body from reaching the electronics BUT it requires a ground strap that is grounded!!
8:00 - Appropriate timing, as the first floppies I used were 8" floppies. They weren't Shugarts, but made by Cal Comp, which most people associate them with pen plotters. If you ever worked with Cal Comp floppy drives, you'll know why they're not know for making floppies.
I remember even larger disks...Can't remember exactly what size they were...also remember reel to reel data "drives"
@@melvance7281 Larger discs would have been "disk packs" or hard drives.
IBM originated the entire floppy disc concept with their 8" floppy - used for mainframe boot loaders initially.
When I started buying floppies, Memorex was the quality brand and unlabeled "No Name" disks was the high failure rate alternative. I later switched to buying Nashua (apparently a HDD platter brand) floppies for most tasks, until market collapsed forced everyone to buy essentially rebadged no name . Now this consumable isn't produced any more.
@@johndododoe1411 Maxwell, then Memorex, then TDK in my experience for quality floppies.
But I concede I never bothered trying Nashua.
Anyone remember KOMAG? Headquartered in Milpitas, CA but did all manufacturing in Malaysia. At their peak, I believe they were the world's largest platter manufacturer.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
Great video.
I am an HDD engineering veteran. I got my start way back in 1982 with a startup that made thin-film heads. This was back in the day when the transition from wound ferrite heads were being replaced by a thin film transducer head made using semiconductor fab techniques.
The hard drive will still be around. The main reason is because it is a very low-cost method for storing data.
Most of the younger folks typically use a combination of SSD along with HDD in their computing and gaming rigs.
Ah, the old days. I remember being green with envy at people who had hard drives. Not just for the storage but the speed; floppies were so disgustingly slow. Initial cost aside, I raise a glass to all the hard drive engineers.
>
TELL me about your troubles.
In fall, 1965, my high school acquired a Monroe, Monrobot desk sized computer available for student use.
Main memory was a magnetic drum.
IO was an IBM typewriter + paper tape input and output.
So compare floppies with that paper tape IO
@@SeattlePioneer Yeah that must've sucked hard. Good thing I wasn't even alive that far back 🤣
Floppy disk loading speeds were blazing fast for me initially, compared to loading stuff from cassette tapes on an 8-bit micro.
@@negirno For sure, floppies were a godsend over tape. But when hard disks arrived, I suffered "my storage solution is crap" heartburn all over again. With 8-bit machines, the floppies were larger than the computer's RAM so I didn't really mind, but with the 16-bit PCs, that was less the case, and then the database apps like dBase cropped up along with word processors that implemented virtual memory, and then floppies became painful. All I could think was, hard drives are the natural solution. Friends who worked with mainframes and minicomputers would mention how they always used hard disks and that VM was an OS level feature for all apps, and smoke would come out my ears in envy.
@@negirno Distant memories. Way back on my BBC micro I wrote wha could almost be called virtual memory. The issue was some games that came on tape but now I had a floppy disk - such speed and capacity! But the downside was that the FDD driver took about 1K of RAM and the games used every last byte. I wrote some assembler that intercepted FDD commands and moved 1K of RAM into the video space while the disk operation was running to free up enough space. It worked perfectly, the only side effect was a crazy screen while accessing the floppy.
I had single stepped through the entire OS (EXMON ROM) and knew everything on this machine from top to bottom. This is no longer possible, has not been for decades and never will be possible again but it was a good feeling to know exactly how everything worked.
But how did I cope with the limitations of floppies and even worse with tapes?
Wow!! I remember taking a day of sick leave so I could drive to Seattle and buy a windows compatible iPod. It was the coolest thing ever to be able to start one song after another. Patched it in to a run of the mill home stereo and it was an instant celebrity! I paid over 400.00 and I think it was a 5GB version? Maybe it was a 20GB. Can't recall the specifics. All I know was it forever changed how I listened to music. I have owned dozens of the various models over the years.
The first one ended up getting stolen at a small party of co workers. I still wonder who actually took it.
Sucks to be them. I just bought another one but kept it on a shorter leash. Back in the day when I made all the coin I wanted building the 747.
Mechanical hardrives still are relevant because of storage size. They just work. Timeless inexpensive.
Absolutely - it will be at least another decade before solid state can compete price wise (I just today bought a 20TB drive to add to my 100TB media collection. Spending that much for solid state would cost me more than my house .
@@MikeDKelley But also, HDDs make more sense for "storage" to me. Why get an SSD which naturally has high performance just to store data on. I mainly use smaller SSDs for storage of things that benefit from the high speed like apps and games, but use large HDDs for everything else. I can't imagine not using HDDs.
@@HScarlet I think it will happen - even for a very old man like me I could see a day when HDDs are obsolete. But, as I say, it will take a while yet, maybe more than a decade. Just too expensive to compete.
@@MikeDKelley Punch cards are definitely obsolete as well as 8-inch floppies and paper tape.
I use an external HDD for my daily backups. It's a Free Agent Go-flex drive with 2 TB capacity. Works for me!
I love how you credit all photos, and then add your own. You sir have made my day.
I worked for an IBM competitor and time after time they bungled their lead. Made us happy. They invented the HDD. (I saw the first prototype in the lobby of one of their buildings in San Jose. It was in rough shape showing how little the gerstner team understood the value of their past successes. I heard they were going to scrap it at the same time they were getting rid of their museum, and somebody talked them into donating it to a museum). I remember when they moved their HDD manufacturing to SE Asia and the UK. Rumor was they decided Moore's Law had run its course and there was no more big gains in capacity coming. As terrible a decision as when they moved their tape to Mexico, but I digress. Their engineers in California would get calls in the middle of the night about production line problems. The lines would be shut down while the engineers had to find the next flights to the plants arriving exhausted to try to tackle the problem that was keeping the lines down. Of course that added costs and hurt production/sales. Offshoring their HDD manufacturing was as poorly thought out executive decision as any I have ever seen. In the end they sold out to Hitachi showing it as over $1B line on their books. 5 years later they had to reverse that CYA entry as an $80M loss. I don't remember any of their execs being fired, but lots of their engineers were submitting resumes around the industry.
It wasn't the outsourcing that was the issue - MOST if not ALL HDD manufacturing was getting outsourced around the same timeframe.
It was the poorly done job of DOING the outsourcing that was the issue.
Thanks for putting this together. It was a fast trip through the life of the hard drive and omitted many stories but gave us a good look at what transpired.
A couple side notes. Finis Connor was associated with Al Shugart in one of the early companies. When Terry Johnson and John Squire started CoData in the 80's they needed someone with more industry wide exposure to get the product out. They got together with Finis Conner and renamed the company Conner Peripherals.
Terry Johnson was the founder of Miniscribe.
In the 80's, my company used to print like 20,000 mailers advertising projected hard drive disc trends.
As they all absorbed each other, it became less & less, until there were 5 or 10 remaining.
Silicon valley location
Good episode as usual. One observation, though: "HDD" is shorter than "hard drive" when written, but 50% longer when spoken. :)
That's because hdd stands for hard disk drive.
Wow Mr Shugart could not stop winning. Founded a successful company which held on to his name so he needed to come up with a different name so he could start another even more successful company.
One of the Shugart companies also made Hard Disk Controllers. I had to modify one of them for a Z-80 computer so that it would reduce the system clock speed from the "turbo speed" 4 MHz to the "normal" 2 MHz, but only for the 16 bytes that had to be fetched from a Boot ROM on the Shugart HDD controller. Then the system speed reverted to a *screamin' 4 MHz.* _All sounds like a joke now, but that's how it was in 1979!_
He was a smart fella, that's fer sure
@@YodaWhat Oh no, doesn't sound like a joke to me. Computers with that level of processing power are theoretically no less useful now than they were then. The modern world is spoiled with orders of magnitude more processing power than we need. Modern computing is more of a joke than computing back then because of the insane waste.
Al, as we liked to call him, would show up just about every quarter and do presentations to all the employees. He was very interesting.
@@mysterium364 Ikr?, for instance, an Intel Xeon processor with 14 cores, 28 thread and 35 MB of cache from 2016 that costed +2000 US$ stopped getting support from intel in 2022 and is now deemed obsolete, you can find them second hand for less than 100$, but if you buy it you're stuck with windows 10 because it is not compatible with windows 11.
@4:46, that's Thomas Watson Jr., son of IBM founder. I found a signed copy of his biography at a thrift store like 2 years ago. Didn't know much about him or the company. The craziest thing I learned from the book is, IBM started out making very precise meat slicer and scale for butcher shops.
Learning HDD prices cost me my innocence. When I built my first computer at 10 I ended up learning a lot about international trade just to understand what was a good price for a HDD. It was my eye opening moment about class disparity between countries as well as a number of other things.
Yeah I started getting into production, right in that period between 2011 and 2013.. I actually just learned the other week why there's a certain amount of drives that are always failing me, when the brand type etc had been reputable and are still reputable.. never occurred to me that that entire batch of drives was just dead drives walking from the earthquakes and tsunamis.. to this day apparently never buy a 3 GB Seagate, and and basically anything that was made during that time, cuz they the parts are so bespoke and need to be so precise that even the minorest of of complications in the manufacturing process..
I guess it's good to have an answer finally, I never thought about it but lol I just thought everything was getting worse and worse but.. boy I wish I had known that back then, cuz I did not back things up or run in raid even, as it was so expensive I needed all the space I got and I was using it as soon as I would get one lol.
You were learning international trade in computer parts at the age of 10. When computer itself was the newest tech on the block.
You must be bill gates and Elon Musk combined. The whole world bows at your feet. Your highness!
@@neerajwa I humbly accept the computer crown 🤴
I started IT in the 80's so I remember having my hands on every drive in this video nor can I even count the amount of systems I put together with them over the years. Has to be 4-5 thousand.
Fun fact: When the IBM PC/AT (5170) came out they contracted with Computer Memories, Inc. for the 20MB drive that came in the AT. We had a 50 percent failure rate in the first 24-48 hours of burn in. Somewhere around here I still have some photos of a table in the lab with about a 100 of them waiting to go back to IBM for replacement. After 1 year IBM canceled the contract with CMI and then they got sued for Patten infringement and the whole company shutdown and yet another one bites the dust.
Eventually,, after so many failures, we started replacing all the 20MB CMI drives with the CDC630 (30 Meg) and had great luck with those plus our customers got another 10meg of data IBM still was not selling yet. 10 whole megabytes more. WoW.
Didn't IBM dual-source their 20MB drives, also using Tandon as a source?
OR was Tandon the replacement for CMI?
@@bricefleckenstein9666
IBM had multiple sources. CMI was successful using FDD head actuators that kept their price low. They started with a 5MB drive, doubled the density to 10 MB successfully but ran into trouble when they tried doing a 20 MB version as the FDD stepper motor was not precise enough to stay on track and their attempt to get to 40 MB was the straw that broke the company's back.
I was working at CDC when they introduced the first commercially available 5 MB 2.5" HDD they called the 'Cricket'. The competition promptly announced competing 5 MB drives and were subsequently shocked when they discovered the Cricket was actually a 10 MB drive just by removing a jumper on the interface. Heh heh!
EMC put a bunch of cheap HDDs in a box, added some firmware, and chipped away at IBM's big storage arrays. Incredible growth in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1999, EMC acquired Data General for their mid-range storage systems.
It's a pleasure to hear info being read by a human being who actually understands what he's saying.
1985: I wanted one of these sweet 5 MB drives so bad.
By 85 the standard had long since shifted to 10MB, with the Seagate ST-412's introduction in 1981 and IBM's selection of that drive for use in the XT as an option the next year. The Seagate ST-225, one of the most prolific and affordable 20MB drives was launched the year prior in 1984.
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force is the same physics as in the linear voice coil actuator. But note that many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, and yes, 10 MB seemed enormous. For several years starting in 1996, I doubled my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
I man I knew in 85 when I was getting into the warez scene on the C64 had one of those 5mb HDDs hooked up somehow through the serial port on his C64. And he was GOD to us kids. An entire shoebox of 170k 5.25 floppy discs in a single noisy vibrating box, it was unreal.
And yet only 4 years later I had a 20mb HDD hooked up to my Amiga 500, and 3 years after that 105mb on my 386-40. This industry grew insanely fast.
@@exidy-yt I know how you feel.
It's similar with RAM. I remember some earlier computers had 512kb of RAM, early laptops among others. Then in 1994 I had a Pentium 60MHz with 8MB. Now we're at a 16GB standard. Just that is 2048 times more.
Thanks!
A great book I recommend reading is Clayton Christensen's "The Innovators Dilemma" - In this book Clay uses the HDD industry as an example to study the topic of innovation lots of really eye opening insights
Strongly also recommend reading The Innovator’s Dilemma.
+1. As he said in it, "Hard drive manufacturers are the fruit flies of industry" - as they or their innovations live and die so quickly
hdds have evolved to the point that i went down to my local computer electronics store and found that 1tb,2tb,4tb,8tb hdd all not being that far off in price with the 16tb being roughly 30% more expensive than the 8tb. currently have a pair of 16tb drives for raw storage capacity and they work pretty damn well.
Same here, 3 x 16TB's in the machine for bulk storage, running through a 2tb gen 5 SSD as a cache for quick access when I need to access the same data over and over. For non bulk I now use Gen 5 and Gen 4, 1 or 2 TB SSD's. Who would have thought that 1 or 2 TB would now be classed as non bulk storage.... lol
@@JoannaHammond yeah i got a 2tb nvme scratch disk for whatever i'm working on at that moment but once i'm done it's sent off to the hdd. the 250gb nvme boot disk is sometimes used in scratch disk work as well
@@blendpinexus1416 Who would buy a HDD in this day and age?
SDDs are cheap as dirt and far more reliable.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 When you need 16TB or more storage plus backup, SSDs aren't "dirt cheap". Plus SSDs aren't more reliable when you put them in a closet for cold storage. You can't keep them off of electricity for too long (a year at most) or they will start to lose data because the cells lose their voltage.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 lol, so buy your 2x16tb ssds pretty sure they will cost 1000s more than HDDS, in a file server HDDS make sense
This is a real trip down memory lane. I had forgotten about many of these names over the decades, but now it all comes flooding back.
As a student in 1978/79 I worked on the IBM 0680 “piccolo” project that they were tooling up for in IBM Havant.
I remember worrying about which way to orient the HD. Somewhere I read ("Byte" probably) that the HD should be kept in the same orientation it had been in when you formatted it. I guess we were afraid gravity could affect that delicate head that was flying around in there.
The concern was not of head flying height, but of actuation. Early drives had no servo tracking (running open loop) and so positioning errors could cause data loss and corruption. These errors would be exacerbated by changes in the orientation of the drive. Many drives had "unacceptable" mounting positions, typically vertical mounting in either direction, and many drives did not appreciate being upside down. There are a few oddballs which cannot be on their side either - This affects the positioner accuracy severely.
You wouldn't want to confuse the computer when it needed to read the hard disk would you?
Excellent video. Lots of information, no action thrills wam bam video editing and no music. Thanks
I bought a 5¼ full height 330MB drive in 1990 or 1991, for $300 -- less than a buck a megabyte! I also bought some little dinky IBM drive, about the plan size of my thumb but only a couple of mm thick. Got it out of curiosity, used it for a few months but I don't remember what for, and 5 or 10 years later found it buried in a box, and it still worked!
A 5¼ full height 330MB drive in 1990 or 1991? A CDC Wren perhaps?
I had two of those in a 33 MHz 486 computer,
@@Peter_S_ Geez, no idea now.
Priam ID330T?
@@Peter_S_ If they had said 380 I'd have guessed Micropolis. But that wasn't a Micropolis drive size.
6:57 I remeber the disk Packs back in the mid 1970s. We opened a large disk reader about the size of a dish washer, lowered the cannister inside, gave it a small twist to unlock it, and pulled out the outer covering leaving the disk stack inside.
That takes me back to when I added a ST506 on my 6809 based Smoke Signal Broadcasting computer. Back when I was pretty good at wire-wrapping interface boards and the 68008 upgrade board.
Aah, the 6809, most beautiful 8-bit CISC microprocessor ever.
i worked as an intern at IBM San Jose in 1990 and saw that first giant platter on display. Later I saw a 100MB 2.5 inch drive and wondered who would ever need such a huge amount of storage?
108 MB Chia plot files sneer at your too-small hard drive.
...and now we can snap a few photos within half a second with our phones that take up that much storage capacity. They are also saved on our tiny phone almost instantaneously.
At least, I had the opportunity to use the removable disk pack in the university research group's VAX lab. So early days it is.
I also remember those huge Shuggart Associate's 8-inch floppy disk drives and a thick operator's manual. One of the special design is need to adjust the spring tensioning for the Read-Write head assembly based on how SA800 is mounted. Gravity matters due to its size and weight.
Another interesting topic is the ST506 interface. The spec has two sets of cable for control and data. A hard drive controller (early ones on ISA bus) is needed to handle the IO abstraction and data encoding/decoding (MFM to RLL, etc. etc. ) tasks.
We had at least a pair of 2.5 MB "disk pack" drive on the PDP-11/70 I learned to program on when I was at Rose-Hulman.
I forget exactly, but I want to say RK-02 or RL-02 models?
Western Digital got it's start in the "Drive controller" side of the industry, working with the ST-506 interface (and it's RLL version), and the later ESDI interface (which was similar but higher performance).
Bust of hard drives? It's going to be a long while before that truly happens.
A long time, like... 5 years?
@@chesshooligan1282Hard drives will still be around for decades to come, or until SSDs match the price per GB of HDDs.
You cannot get a 10TB SSD at the price of a 10TB HDD yet, and I don't see it happening in 5 years.
@@GoldSrc_ SSDs are way more reliable and miles ahead in terms of performance. No need to match price per terabyte if you only need half the number of SSDs for the same reliability. We're getting pretty close to that. There are also newer SSDs that can be written virtually an infinite number of times. Still very expensive, but they'll come down in price. If I had to put my money on it, I would say five years until the hard drive joins the floppy disc in the history books.
A few years ago they said paper based books would be obsolete by now and Kindles and e-books would takeover ,didn't happen!
@@Playlist-fj9hx Paper books ARE obsolete. Only a few weirdos use them, but there are also weirdos out there who use typewriters and vinyl records.
Wow. It took 21 minutes to finally say _Western Digital._ They were *the* go-to HDD when I first got into PCs.
My first PC computer was an IBM compatible 286 with a 10mb HDD, cost £2500 used, and was a few years old. It seemed lightning fast back then. Memory was selling then for £100 for a 1mb stick.
Offices were broken into to steal the memory sticks out of computers, they left the computers, just took the memory.
Nice country.
Also hear people were stealing them from school computers in the 90s. Apparently many smart kids never got in any kind of trouble, because no one ever noticed they nicked just one of the two RAMs. The computer would still be ok for the tasks at the school, just a bit slower.
The Computer History Museum in the SF Bay Area has a working RAMAC actively reading and writing data. It is an amazing thing to see in person.
That would get me all wet...
@6:00 you overlooked the 1311 and later the 2311 disk drives that used a smaller 1316 disk pack. The 1311 was the first removable pack disk drive. These were about the size of a largish washing machine with a hinged lid that lifted up to allow the packs to be mounted and changed.
There were 10 heads on a hydraulic (yes, bloody hydraulic!) actuator, and each head was about the size of a thumbnail, with a very slight radius that forced air rotating with the disk to lift the heads and make them fly over the disk surface. This produced a lot of lifting force - the arms of the actuator had springs that pressed the head onto the disk with a surprisingly strong pressure to counter the lifting force. There were even two holes in the head (really the shoe that held the head) to let some of that air out, so that the head could get closer to the disk.
I actually owned two 1311 drives back in the late 70s. I never got my 6800/Z80 home made PC's to read and write data to them, but I did get the actuator working.
In the seek test, especially for short movements, the actuator moved so fast that it was was a blur. There was a toothed wheel on the actuator drive mechanism, with a detent arm that locked the wheel in position for each of the 100 actuator positions (200 for the 2311). The detent arm was also driven in and out hydraulically, so there was a lot going on in the seeking operation. It was amazing how fast it worked.
For even more amazingly fast early (and also hydraulic) IBM data storage technology, take a look at the weird and wonderful 2321 Data Cell Drive...
My very old page about it: members.optusnet.com.au/intaretro/2321DCD.htm
In the early '80s I was excited to get an Atari 1200XL, which I quickly realized needed a B.A.S.I.C. cartridge to be able to program, (I had a subscription to Compute! magazine). Soon realized that the programs I typed in "went away" when I turned it off. After much pleading my parents bought me a cassette tape player along with several books on BASIC. I could now save my programs, (in about 5-10min/same to load). About a year later an enlightened me bought a 5 1/4" disk drive which cut the time to seconds as well as an Atari 130XE which had enough memory to create a ram drive and was delighted with the speed. Soon an uncle of mine brought over a "doubler" chip which doubled the speed and capacity after he soldered it in. 180K - 360K per side of the disk. Loved those early '80s when I was "go-to guy" and most tech savvy in town with a 300 baud modem, dot matrix printer & 100s of programs...
Anyone else remember those days?
Is that 0.3k?!
Jeez, my first was a 33.6k modem. Many friends had the 28.8k(?) still. I was king once I upgraded to 56k and could download mp3s in a matter of minutes with speeds up to 4.7kb a second!
It is incredibly business-brained to call the hard drive a "graveyard of profits" the internet would be a shadow of itself without it. The knowledge saved and shared by hard drives has been simply a priceless boon to humanity and all the people who worked to delivered it are blessed.
I lived near the old Winchester manufacturing facility in south San Jose, they left that land very polluted.
As I recall ,the major contributor to the pollution was a nearby Fairchild Semiconductor Fab. This was discovered when there was a high degree of birth defects in the children of families who lived in a neighborhood near the fab. The Neighborhood and the fab were upstream of the IBM plant and the water moved downstream through the aquifer toward the San Francisco Bay. Rather than fight with the government over whose fault it was, IBM drilled lots of wells to analyze the type and concentration of chemicals in the aquifer and took remediation steps while they owned the property.
1982_02_28-At-Fairchild-new-reports-of-toxic-leaks-San-Jose-Mercury-Susan-Yoshum
This brings back a lot of memories. In the 1980s and 90s I worked as a technician setting up PCs (clones). It was amazing to see how fast the capacity of the hard drives grew every year. 10M 20M 40M 80M 200M 500M 1G etc. 🙂👍
Incredible how a technology that's still more complex to produce than practically 95% of the stuff we use daily is mostly considered obsolete because how it belongs to an industry where everything is cutting edge in technology.
A tub file was a fixture to store cards that can be available to the office workers. I worked in an office section at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from 1970 until 1973, and that is where I saw the blue file holders made by Diebold. The 1970s beginning was a time when data would be stored from conventional cards and paper to punch cards, tapes, and inside the computer systems. Today, my Dell OptiPlex microcomputer contains a solid state drive with a storage capacity of 2 terabytes, right in the privacy of my home. Meanwhile, I cannot get enough of big data storage.
My first PC had a 20mb 5.25" Seagate. I can still recall the sound of it spinning up. Ah, the days of youth and DOS... ❤
My first PC was an IBM Clone Cordata 286 with two 5.25 inch floppy drives. The Hard drive option was quite expensive back in 1988 so I had to switch from DOS to my applications,ah you bought back some nostalgia there!.😉
Great video! I built my first PC in 2000 and few years later started using the WD Raptor drives and used them in various sizes until SSDs took over. If anyone from WD sees this I gotta say thank you! Fast, reliable drives served me well for decades
13:08 needs a 2TB chewing gum packet sized nvme next to it, for another 3 orders of magnitude :D
And the 20MB "Hard Card" - so cool.
I remember when my dad got our first 1 gb HDD for our family PC, I think it was sometime in the latter half of the 90’s, maybe 97 or 98. What a time to be alive. It was a seagate.
aaand it died a year later
I remember our family upgrading from a 4 GB HDD to a 20 GB Maxtor HDD in the ~Win98 era. A 5x increase; astounding! "Surely we'd never create enough documents or install enough programs to fill this up!" ClipArt libraries were on CDs!
@@crash.override When I bought my first CD burner, the hdd in my computer (a Pentium 90) was 640 Megabytes - literally the same size as a CD.
As an avid keyboard specialist, computer user and fan, since I first tried the IBM PC in 1988 during training, I am still fascinated with the hard disk drive as a storage part of a microcomputer. That is the reason I would prefer the IBM PC-XT over the IBM PC. Today, in the year 2024, I have a Dell OptiPlex All-In-One 7410 Plus that has an integrated circuit called "solid state drive," hence SSD. Your topic was made especially for me to arouse my appreciation for the microcomputer. I will not want to look backward, let alone to the typewriter. I believe that Seagate made the best hard disks. I had one in my first microcomputer which was Cybernet that I purchased in 2002. I hope to see more of your stories about microcomputer technology. You made this story just for me.
Fascinating story. Some ways that I have intersected with it. I remember seeing the IBM disk packs being used in our university's computer centre in the late 1970s (no PCs in those days), and then built a copy of the university's in-house CPM-based computers which boasted an 8" floppy disk drive (cost me AUD$500 in the 1980s). In the late 1980s I installed a 10MB HDD in a PC of a professor, thinking "Why does anyone need that much storage space?".
Well researched video with photos only. It looks boring but its not. The dictionof the voice over is remarkable in such a way you want to continue watching this humble video. Well done.
I beg to differ my friend. With enormous home digital movie collections, in particular with the popularity of home NAS systems, the HDD is the only means possible. Every server and commercial data centers thrive on them. Imho, the HDD is on the rise!👍
People will say stuff like "hdds are so out! Why would you buy an SSD?" and then they keep all their data "in the cloud" which is literally a big data centre full of hdds! 😂
Yep, I would love to get alternatives like Ultrium 9 drives for my private backupping needs but they are simply far too expensive. HDDs will have the best price per TB ratio for a long time if you don't have to back up petabytes. Also SSDs and backups don't mix.
I got >40TB plus redundancy in HDD storage and running out of space again. Would cost me maybe 1500 in total at the moment, if I would buy new HDDs (sadly prices went up since last year). An external Ultrium 9 drive is 3800 Euros. A single 15.36 TB Kioxia SSD is 2000+ Euros.
I bought a 16TB disk last year and it contains all my multimedia for easy access. No need to use an SSD for those kinds of speeds.
HDDs are probably better for long term storage than SSDs also, since SSDs still need some electric power with intervals depending on the specific SSD.
Great video, thanks! Another small bit of history: Ampex, an important company in magnetic storage and its use in the video industry. During my years in San Jose I had an elderly colleague who had previously worked in an R&D lab at Ampex in the 60's when they were developing a washing machine sized hard drive. He told a story about how they kept tripping on power cords which would destroy the read/write heads scratched the platters as the beast spun down. So they designed a huge solenoid to yank the arms out if the power was lost - good job, problem solved. Except... A few weeks later, the power cord was again yanked out by accident, causing the hard drive arms to retract while another engineer's arm was inside the machine! The poor guy lost part of a finger! It's amazing to consider that these technolgoies originated as washing machine sized objects that people used wrenches, drills and hammers on. :-D And as such, posed certain health safety risks!
In the late 80s we ordered a 1.9GB drive.
It took 4 of us to carry it up the stairs.
I wonder what was the price. Also, cheapskates risking fragile expensive device
Great video! I purchased my first hard disk, a 40 MB Maxtor 8051A in 1990, at a cost of approximately $1,500. I can't say exactly when I switched to SSD's, but the end of the HD era came to a very sudden halt for me. But hats off to the line of inventors and engineers who kept them progressing and lasting for so many years.
Not all modern platters are glass, there are aluminum plates as well
All the ones I've ever taken apart looked like mirror-polished aluminum.
Correct. Typically Enterprise drives are/were glass and Personal aluminum. This is one of many small technical errors in the presentation.
I got the first BASF 10 MB "Winchester" hard drive and also received an offer to work at Miniscribe as an electrical engineer. Declined the offer and worked for another company that made BSR X-10 systems.
I just bought two more 18 Terabyte HDD's yesterday..... I assure you the hard drive market is alive and well, as it will be likely for "decades" to come! Until the cost per TB on any other storage tech can closely match that of hard drives, the old tried and true spinning disk will remain supreme leader of the pack for long term bulk storage in mass quantity.
Cheers 🍻
Yeah, but it's data hoarders and data centers only. Whereas before every PC/notebook had an HDD. I have no idea how this translates to market figures, but still a significant consumer base loss for a low-margin business.
PS I work at a PC parts distributor and can say that for quite some time, HDD sales are far from what they used to be, compared to ssds. At least in our country.
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul:
I'm just backing up movies, so far 120 TB worth and counting..... I'm certainly not hoarding, it is my exact intention to give it all away before I die. I just don't know how to do that, exactly. I need massive amounts of storage that none of these SSD's can provide, let alone provide it affordably. I'm looking forward to the day when they can, but I see it at least a decade away minimum. In the meantime, any idea how to give away over a 100 TB of movies and TV shows?
@@Finite-Tuning the only practical way I see is to transfer the NAS/server containing the storage your media is on to the beneficiary. Anything else would be too much hassle. Unless you absolutely want to take it with you on your trip to the pyramid
@@BoraHorzaGobuchul:
Yes exactly, practical with least amount of hassle has been my two main problems to overcome. Maybe the internet archive? Most of what I have are exact 1:1 ISO files, not some compressed streaming crap, and to in multiple versions. Giving it all to 1 that has no idea what it is or how to use it would be a slow painful death. I want the world to have it or at least have access to it in a way that cannot be shut down.
@@Finite-Tuning t0rrent is the optimal way to share stuff with many. However, for it to be successful, there's a lot of hoops to jump through. For it to be usable, it has to be catalogued, supplied with something like nfo files with relevant metadata (tinymediamanager is the way to do this), and posted on a good tr@ckēr with a good description. Also, legal issues may apply. All that takes quite some effort. So if you really want it but don't feel like doing all that the only way is to find somebody who is ready to.
Also, if it's movies or other media works, those may have already been shared, and often in much better quality than one can find on DVDs if that's the medium in question. Think blueray rēmuxes and open matte versions.
There was also the curious story of Micropolis, a struggling hard disk manufacturer. Let's start with the end-- investigators found a recipt in the Micropolis files-- a receipt for $400 worth of house bricks. It turned out Micropolis had been shipping thousands of boxes of "hard disks" to their warehouse and logging them as sold hard disks in order to push up their sales numbers. It turns out it was a scheme to ship bricks in hard disk boxes to inventory in order to make their sales numbers look better.
I started building PCs in 1995.
Yeah, a LOT of change WAS driven by disk capacity and it opened up the world of multi-media for PC
As I understand it, the rotary "Winchester" actuator is still referred to as a *voice coil actuator* because the essential _I cross B_ physics producing the mechanical force to move the heads quickly is the same physics as in the older linear voice coil actuator. But many of the early HDDs for personal computers used neither form of voice coil. Instead, they used a stepper motor outside of the sealed platter enclosure, and the heads could be permanently repositioned on the platters by way of a set screw on the stepper motor shaft. I personally used that method (along with SpinRite) to revive a 10 megabyte HDD that had _literally been a doorstop_ at a law firm, after numerous head crashes had made it unbootable. In fact, the oxide layer was visibly scraped off the first 12 tracks! That was my first HDD, in 1987, and that 10 MB capacity seemed enormous. But it was _S L O W!_ Then came multimedia and internet... For several years starting in 1996, I had to double my HDD capacity every 6 months, always selling the lightly-used drive to help finance the upgrade. Now I have 20+ terabytes on various _much faster_ HDDs, and though I upgrade less often, _it is still never enough capacity!_ ;-)😉
A bigger difference to multimedia on PC was the CD drive.
You didn't need a lot of space on the drive, you could do a minimal install and the computer would get just about all data needed from the CD.
This wasn't optimal, and I had nice computers back then, but the storage capacity of your hard drive was not key to your multimedia usage. Unless of course you were some weirdo that didn't have a CD drive by 1995.
CONGRATULATIONS!! great video .. worked in the industry for over 20 years
Hard Disk are bot disappearing any time soon - they are still the best price/performance option for data archiving and are regularly used by cloud storage providers to service things like youtube, cloud storage etc. This video is probably hosted on a raid array on hard drives some where. Though they are no longer popular on individual computers, people still use them every day through cloud services.
Exactly what I was going to say. I have a media array for plex/jellyfin and the cost effectiveness just isn't even remotely there for SSDs, especially when you don't need high speed random access.
@@jasonblazgk9973 You also have to consider that hard drive continue to improve and Seagate has a new 30TB drive out, try get that in SSDs.
People don't care about that when the cost is already so low of better options.
Who the hell would get an HDD when SDDs are only marginally more expensive?
HDDs are an option in the third world, that's about it.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 For archival storage and for large volume cloud storage - try to get a 20TB drive in SSD for anything close to the price of a HDD. For large capacities HDD is still WAY cheaper.
@@incumbentvinyl9291you obviously don't store any significant amount of data locally, then. SSD are many times more expensive per TB than HDD. If you only need 1TB of storage for your operating system and a few games, yeah obviously an SSD is the best choice. If you're storing 100TB of data then you'll pay a fortune for SSD and it will be completely wasteful because it's fast when it doesn't need to be. Oh, you're storing all your data in the cloud? Guess what, Dropbox is storing your data on an array of HDDs.
Excellent telling of the story. One thing I remember as a significant, but short-lived bump was IBM's RPS (Rotational Position Sensing) technology. RPS allowed a disk controller to request a record from somewhere, then do something else while the disk rotated around to bring the record into position and read it. The predecessor to RPS was the special-order "airline buffer" that did the same thing electronically.
I love that many of the early electronics researchers were hired just to come up with something new. Reminds me of Tuomo Suntolas ALD projects.
The 2311 disk pack preceded the 2314... then the 3330..... those were the last ones I worked with.
Fun fact: the Seagate factory pictured at the end of the episode is the former Solyndra facility. :D
It became Segate via Maxtor. Maxtor bought it, then Seagate acquired Maxtor.
It was HMT, a disc platter maker, prior to that.
Great video. Thanks for a trip down memory lane. I was only in the industry for 5 years from 1995 to 2000. But there were lots of old-timers that regailed me with much of the same stories. But, by the time I got started, it was a mad rush off the cliff and the end of days was inevitable.
Conner Peripherals shocked the industry back in the late 1980's when they introduced a drive with the disk controller integrated into the drive itself (IDE interface), which led the way to parallel ATA. I believe it was 40Mbytes.
i think their first one was 20meg - CP3022 - I worked at Olivetti at the time as was blown away when we say it. All the other names were a trip down memory lane. Some of them were famously unreliable - Olivetti’s own OPE disk were always back for repair along with miniscribes - NEC’s were very reliable and sought after.
Maxtors were generally ok and Micropolis too
@@eliotmansfield I'm pretty sure that Connor introduced both the 20 AND the 40 at the same time.
I want to say there was a larger drive in the same series introduced a month or two later?
@@bricefleckenstein9666 yes the 20 and 40 may well of come out at the same time or almost the same time
@@eliotmansfield Olivetti. The hard drive sandwich company. A 5.25 drive, sandwiched between two pieces of plywood and stuffed into a box with poly foam.
@13:10 That looks like my old Maxtor drive. I ran a computer bulletin board in the early 90's on a 286/12, 16meg ram with a Maxtor xt1140 140 meg MFM, debugged in Rll to 205megs. Southern Fried BBS running Maximus on OS/2 out of Naples Florida.