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 plates. 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.
I am a recent ex-western digital employee, and here’s my two cents: The people who still work at western digital (and the hdd industry as a whole) are the same people who were there when it started. Everyone (except the new grads which they have recently begun hiring) was actually there in the industry from its start up until today. I could ask anyone to tell me stories of the early days, and they would talk about how they were hired fresh out of college into the new hdd industry. The people there have some truly unique and irreplaceable knowledge, they have been working on hdds for decades.
I was struck by there being no mention of Western Digital until 21 minutes into the 22 minute video. I used Western Digital hard drives almost exclusively in my several decades of rebuilding, updating and repairing old PC's for use by my extended family from the 286 era onward and the company I then worked for in the 486 and Pentium eras, and then later when building custom gaming PC's for my dozen or so in-laws and nephews. While I still dabble in upgrading laptops, I really don't follow the industry any longer. In those forty years and a hundred or so hard drives installed using various work-arounds to crowbar newer tech into old machines I can only remember one Western Digital Hard Drive ever failing.
Western digital was good hdd company pre-sandisk. Post sandisk has gone down hill a lot in quality. I still think Hitachi was the best part of western digital post sandisk. Wouldn't buy a western digital drive unless I know for a fact, that the hitachi hdd part of western digital made it or came from them.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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
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!_ ;-)😉
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’.”
One of my first tasks in the computer industry was to haul a 3 foot diameter, 1/4" thick hard drive platter for a Dataproducts drive to another city. The crate it was in took up the whole back seat area of my small car. Later, I helped maintain a room full of 200+ CDC BR3B8 80 MB disk pack drives on one site, Each drive weighed around 700 lbs, and required 3 phase 240V power. I just now looked in a tray of assorted junk to find a micro SD card that stores more data than all the drives in that room, and can access it faster. I continue to be amazed by things like that,
We got a request from the navy back in the early 2000s when one of those big disks failed on a sub and they wanted to see if we could rebuild it. We just laughed but the guys out in Bingamton at IBM tore down a wall and found the old servo track writer and we're able to do it for them.
I worked at a company in 1992 that still had guys running tapes from racks to readers when the big board on the wall displayed the location of the tape that needed to be put in a particular tape drive.
@@goofyfoot2001 I did that job for a while when I first started working at NCS (later NCS/Pearson) - I was their last "Tape Operator" hire before they installed a pair of robotic silos to replace the setup and the almost 100,000 tapes library. Some of my last hours in the position was feeding tapes for data transfer to the silos. 1999/2000 timeframe.
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!
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.
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.
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
@@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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bust? Drives will never bust. As capacity increases, people become hoarders. Eventually every bit of data ever specified will be stored in a single 3.5 hdd
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.
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.
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.
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!_ ;-)😉
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.
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?
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.
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.
HDDs no longer need innovation in terms of speed, just in terms of capacity. SSDs can serve as super-speed cache for large capcity HDDs. I remember building my first pc in the 2000s with a 500GB hard drive, then upgrading to 1TB, 4TB, and now 8TB, all for approximately the same dollar cost. Hopefully the trend continues and I can continue to get cheaper and cheaper storage in the future.
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
@@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 read a story of one of the washing machine-size drives being disconnected from power, which caused the drive to remain spinning with the alarming amount of angular momentum it stored being well-preserved. Apparently the truck it was loaded onto took a turn and the entire drive assembly precessed right out the side.
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.
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!_ ;-)😉
@@tookitogo I once owned a pair of Micropolis 3085 drives - used them in RLL quite reliably for years despite them not being "rated" for RLL operation. I think I might have owned something of theirs a few years later, perhaps a 380MB or 760MB ESDI drive?
There are still evolutions, new alloys used, writing also using lasers and temperature, ever smaller heads, tricks like writing multiple tracks together, etc. .
One mention. The startup hard drive brands, once MFM and RLL 5.25" hard disk were gone, made devices that were mechanically OK, but had a very SLOW data transfer rate, when compared to Seagate...
@@JasonCarmichael It's the sound that's hard to capture in the modern era. So few of these drives are left, even though many are operational, not many people can use them. I strive to keep that part of the history alive myself.
@@TheDiskMaster I bought a new 14TB Seagate Exos drive that's filled with helium, at least I can hear it making sound when I use it. Some people complain that's a "bug", I think its a feature. Seagate is still the best manufacturer. I miss the sound those old drives made, specially the Quantum Fireball I had when I was a child. Maybe its just nostalgia. I think I'm going to make a virtual emulator board with a speaker that plugs into the SATA and makes the sound for me.
Even thou I have 3 SDDs of 1TB each that are super fast, as I use a lot of VMs on my workstation and I'm a data hoarder and I have a lot of games that I refuse to store in the cloud, I still have 8 mechanical hard drives in my workstation. (lol, I used to joke that I have more hard drives than the average of my customers' server, well, when they were on-prem, servers usually come with only 6 bays, I had 10 bays on my PC)
@@monad_tcp The sound is part of the experience. Loved the spin up sound at power on. The nature of the sound also gave a feel of what was going on in the system.
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
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.
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!!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?".
I don't think the HDD is truly dead. I still keep back-ups of mostly pictures, videos and a vast library of books and papers from when I was in college. I know there's another type of long term storage that functions like old cassette tapes, but the downside is that if I wanna access a file from the end of the tape, I have to wait for the tape to physically be accessed; which doesn't happen with HDDs.
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!
I start my career as a programmer at a bank that had a rule that all apps had to be able to run on a 360/30. The bank had these as backups to their main 360/50s, 65s, 75s. These machines had the 2311 hard drives each the size of a top loading washing machine. One day I discovered one of these 360/30s siting idle in a dark room. So I sneaked in, powered it up and did some testing. I regularly did this. One day I got so frustrated with my testing that I hit the power off button forgetting to first power down each disk drive and removing the disks. There was a hell of a bang as all the heads suddenly retracted. Goodness knows what damage was caused. I packed the disks away and left the room post haste!
I was here for the entire run of hard drives. I remember single platter cartridges for data general minicomputers. CDC Hawk... I remember at Western Bancorp, in the machine room, a vast array of IBM 3350 units. Maybe a hundred of them. All for the IBM 37 0/195's They had two. I wrote SCSI drivers for the ST506, and the DMA Systems 5+5 5-fixed and 5-removeable. I put the first hard drive on the ACT Apricot. I scavenged a xebec controller and ST506 drive from and old computer and wired the xebec controller to the printer-port, then wrote a custom hard disk driver for Concurrent CP/M that accessed the printer port. All this over the weekend, and what a scene at work on Monday when I showed off my kludge.
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.
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!.😉
Two things come to mind. First, from a mechanical engineering perspective, these things have far more precision than you can imagine, so why does it work at all! The second is how do they last so long! I got my first Mac in 2000. I bought a Maxtor 120gb external and connected it. Worked great. Today it's connected to my latest iMac and it still works perfectly. My other TOSHIBA (2007) laptop has a Hitachi 250GB HD. It's never been turned off, running continuously since 07. (it supplies a background music system)
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.
It's intriguing that you chose this moment to discuss the "bust" of HDDs, considering that Seagate recently made an announcement about the mass production of HDDs utilizing a groundbreaking technology known as HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) earlier this year in 2024. This significant development, which Seagate has spent two decades researching, has been hailed as a "game-changing technology" by numerous experts. It appears that you might need to revise your video in the near future to reflect this new information.
Worked at Seagate for a bunch of years and in the industry much longer... I remember HAMR being in development and many of us thought it was a few years away and always would be... glad it's seeing the light of day finally...
I too was surprised he did not mention HAMR which will be great leap in HDD storage, I think now we are a couple of years away from seeing 40-60 TB hdd
I was looking for someone talking about the bust as I have purchased quite a few 10TB drives this year at work. I got 10TB models because they were a great price @ around $90US each for used enterprise HGST He10s in good working condition which I verified with a week of badblocks testing on each drive. With that said I would love to use SSDs instead for our server storage. Maybe when the price of SSDs get down below $200 per 8TB of storage and it doesn't even need to be NVMe.
They had a heck of a time getting them to work right. The first concept heads used an electrostatic mirror to position the laser but every side of the head had to be machined. I remember talking to Phil Gorks at the Rivdrside lab and he was laughing saying, "We made two heads that worked!". Later on they made a bunch of heads and j6st started testing them so see if they could get an outlier. It worked! The winner, when tore down and evaluated was contaminated with a rare element and everyone was sworn to secrecy about what it was.
At least its not SMR. SMR drives was one real nail into HDD coffin recently. To get drive which is both slow and have to be used very carefully and can shift data around on itself (= drive is busy on its own) was really good motivation to say "nope, now SSD only".
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.
Both my parents worked at IBM for years. Mum once described every time a new box of punch cards would be opened, the first thing they would do was to grab a Sharpie and draw a diagonal stripe across the top of the cards... lest the entire box accidentally spill.
20 yrs ago I managed an IT department, which still had an IBM mainframe. For some reason, even their newer storage units were still refered to as RAMACs. And today my cell phone holds way more data than all that hardware.
The magnetic paint stuck to the platters by a process nicknamed 'cling-on' - Gene Roddenberry heard the name at a conference; liking it, he used it in Star Trek.
21:12 I dunno, I think there's still some innovation left to be wrung out of the old magnetic storage corpse. We're just now seeing HAMR after a decade-plus of active product development, and maybe I'll live to see HDMR (heated-dot) after that.
I purchased an Intertech Superbrain in 1980. It had 2 162K floppy drives along with 64K of working memory, and an integrated keyboard and CRT monitor. The price was $3k. I couldn't afford the 5 Mbyte hard disk drive to go along with it, it was another $5.5k. Fast forward. I just purchased a used Dell W7 computer with 8 GB of working memory (expandable to 32 GB) and a 1 TB WD hard drive. The price from a west coast refurbisher: $125.00 with shipping included.
The tens of thousands of spinning hard drives in the datacenters I service say that the "bust" described here is total BS. Nobody is doing bulk storage with 10 to 1 price ratios on solid state storage.
Thank you. Sure, I've got an SSD in my laptop, but until SSDs cost the same per GB as HDDs, we're still going to be spinning a lot of bits around at high speeds.
When the first digital telephone exchanges were installed, 10 meg HDs were standard. The exchanges had big rooms full of them requiring air conditioning. The failure rate was quite low as they seldom had to stop then restart. Most ran 24/7 for years.
@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
A couple clarifications from someone who was there. Al Shugart wanted to use "Shugart Technology" but Xerox threatened to sue claiming the acquisition included the name. Also, just before Al started Seagate, Shugart had already begun a 5.25 inch project, designing for 10MB on three platters, and based on the same interface (SA 400) as its dominant 5.25 inch floppies. Seagate introduced its two platter 10MB drive before Shugart could, even though it started later, and based it on what it called an ST 506 interface. The OEMs went for it, not only obsoleting Shugart's interface, but beating it in cost. Shugart never recovered. Thanks so much to the authors of this piece.
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?
FYI, as far as I know, the floppy sizes were never referred to in decimal; it was always 5¼″ (‘five-and-a-quarter inch’) and 3½″ (‘three-and-a-half inch’). Apart from that, as always excellent content. And yes, I did look for proper primes; I’m a typophilic OCD guy.
I worked for an electronics company in the 90s and all our jackets had wire woven in them. You used to get in a lot of trouble if you didn't have all the poppers done up though as they acted as a human Faraday cage.
HDDs are still heavily used in data centers. Their ever decreasing cost per MB far outpaces modern SSDs. *THAT* is their downfall in the end-user market. The average computer user, either home or business, has no need for a 20 terabytes of storage. However, smaller capacity SSDs can meet these minimal storage requirements and do it orders of magnitude faster. Being significantly less heavy and shock prone are also bonuses, when it comes to portable devices. I have NVMe and/or SSD drives in all my devices, but I still back everything up to spinning rust.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted Why does this old wives tale persist? Technically, yes. SSDs have limited write cycles before the NAND flash starts to write issues. However, even the *HEAVIEST* disk usage will still provide many, many years of use. You will likely replace your computer several times before the disk even starts to report write errors. Even then, with wear leveling and over-provisioning, you will have years more of use out of them with no loss of capacity or risk of loss of data.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted Most SSDs are warrantied for being able to write hundreds of terabytes of data per TB of capacity. Most people aren't filling their whole drive, erasing it, and repeating often enough for that to be a problem. You also should backup any data you aren't willing to lose. If you're trying to recover data from a failed drive, you've messed up badly.
@@5467nick Well, that not entirely true. For 3D TLC memory general rule is 600 rewrites, so yo get 600TB for 1Tb drive. For QLC this can drop to 100 rewrites and sometimes even less, also amount of data written and NAND write does not match, i seen drives which have almost x2 multiplier. Its true that resource is BIG but its not infinite and QLC drives, especially cheaper drives from less known brands can fail. But MLC\TLC - doubtful.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted You just need to pick right model. Recently got myself 1Tb MLC drive dirt cheap, it had 70Tb written on it and 100% health. How? Because its resource is magnitude bigger. Just stay away from QLC and you will be fine.
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've actually been in Seagate facility in the states that made drive suspensions. I think this is a rare miss for the channel in terms of context. Perhaps a Part II at some point. The reason there were still facilities in the US is also the reason why the same main players didn't get undercut by up and coming companies from Asia. In the 90s the secret sauce of the company were the drive suspensions. Not just the head. As one engineer explained to me at the time, "Under no circumstances is that IP going overseas to get stolen." There are many who think keeping that IP close to home is why we're still buying Seagate and Western Digital drives and now instead of something from a lower cost Asian competitor. In particular in the 90s when competition was fierce. I also think there's also there's could be an interesting story around how Hutchinson Technologies (now TDK) had Seagate and others over a barrel on patents in the 90s. Seagate was trying to innovate an alternative to get our from under their thumb back then. My other observation is the ashes of Control Data were still influencing both Seagate and Hutchinson in the 90s. Also of interesting note, in the 90s Shugart liked to visit the manufacturing and R&D facilities and hold court in the lunch room talking to all the engineers and technicians. He really liked to have a ground level view of what was going on.
And Shugart gave his name to the first industry standard high density (at the time) interface, the SASI (Shugart And Associates Standard Interface). Which later evolved into SCSI, which still exists now in the forms of SATA & SAS.
I have 10k drives online right now, and I think 12k or 15k RPM drives exist? yet there was a line in here about drives "up to 7200 RPM." Sometimes I think these detailed inaccuracies are left for the pedants to bump up the "engagement" numbers. :)
The Bigfoot was 4500RPM. All drives with the SA1000 interface (8" drives) are 3000RPM and all drives with the ST-506/ST-412 interface (most 5.25" and early 3.5" offerings) run at 3600RPM. This also carries over for ESDI drives and many early IDE devices.
@@TheDiskMaster Bigfoot was a mix, the original (no suffix) and CY run at 3600 and the TX and TS are 4000. The most recent 3600 RPM drive I'm aware of is the Fujitsu MEA3320BT, which also happens to be the only 3600 RPM SATA drive I'm aware of.
Used to work at the company that owned the HDD head actuator market, Hutchinson Technology (now owned by TDK). They started to see the writing on the wall back in the early/MID 90s and began to diversify. Once I left the company I no longer followed what they were doing. It still amazes me that a company like Hutchinson Tech was one of the main actuator supplier for the world wide HDD market. Their manufacturing facility in the early/MID 90s was a step above garage manufacturing. But, they pulled it off for many years and rode the bust/boom of the computer world.
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 plates. 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.
I am a recent ex-western digital employee, and here’s my two cents:
The people who still work at western digital (and the hdd industry as a whole) are the same people who were there when it started. Everyone (except the new grads which they have recently begun hiring) was actually there in the industry from its start up until today. I could ask anyone to tell me stories of the early days, and they would talk about how they were hired fresh out of college into the new hdd industry. The people there have some truly unique and irreplaceable knowledge, they have been working on hdds for decades.
Heroes
I was struck by there being no mention of Western Digital until 21 minutes into the 22 minute video. I used Western Digital hard drives almost exclusively in my several decades of rebuilding, updating and repairing old PC's for use by my extended family from the 286 era onward and the company I then worked for in the 486 and Pentium eras, and then later when building custom gaming PC's for my dozen or so in-laws and nephews. While I still dabble in upgrading laptops, I really don't follow the industry any longer. In those forty years and a hundred or so hard drives installed using various work-arounds to crowbar newer tech into old machines I can only remember one Western Digital Hard Drive ever failing.
Western digital was good hdd company pre-sandisk. Post sandisk has gone down hill a lot in quality. I still think Hitachi was the best part of western digital post sandisk. Wouldn't buy a western digital drive unless I know for a fact, that the hitachi hdd part of western digital made it or came from them.
@@aliensounddigital8729 well most are seagates now pretty sure
@@aliensounddigital8729i have always had pretty good luck with WD drives.
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
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 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.
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
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
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
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!_ ;-)😉
@@YodaWhat And now I will not buy a drive smaller than 20TB 😆
Heh, I have a colossal 74Kb HDD!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my first tasks in the computer industry was to haul a 3 foot diameter, 1/4" thick hard drive platter for a Dataproducts drive to another city. The crate it was in took up the whole back seat area of my small car. Later, I helped maintain a room full of 200+ CDC BR3B8 80 MB disk pack drives on one site, Each drive weighed around 700 lbs, and required 3 phase 240V power. I just now looked in a tray of assorted junk to find a micro SD card that stores more data than all the drives in that room, and can access it faster. I continue to be amazed by things like that,
We got a request from the navy back in the early 2000s when one of those big disks failed on a sub and they wanted to see if we could rebuild it. We just laughed but the guys out in Bingamton at IBM tore down a wall and found the old servo track writer and we're able to do it for them.
I worked at a company in 1992 that still had guys running tapes from racks to readers when the big board on the wall displayed the location of the tape that needed to be put in a particular tape drive.
@@goofyfoot2001 I did that job for a while when I first started working at NCS (later NCS/Pearson) - I was their last "Tape Operator" hire before they installed a pair of robotic silos to replace the setup and the almost 100,000 tapes library.
Some of my last hours in the position was feeding tapes for data transfer to the silos.
1999/2000 timeframe.
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 🤴
In the late 80s we ordered a 1.9GB drive.
It took 4 of us to carry it up the stairs.
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.
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.
Finally, after all those years now I know why HDD called Winchester. 🤯
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
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!
@@PJ-fj9hx Paper books ARE obsolete. Only a few weirdos use them, but there are also weirdos out there who use typewriters and vinyl records.
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.
Good episode as usual. One observation, though: "HDD" is shorter than "hard drive" when written, but 50% longer when spoken. :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bust? Drives will never bust. As capacity increases, people become hoarders. Eventually every bit of data ever specified will be stored in a single 3.5 hdd
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.
I didn't realize the Hard Disk went "Bust," it's still the cheapest per megabyte form of storage, and in my experience far more reliable than SSD.
For me SSDs have been far more reliable but my sample size is small as I only have a few hundred of each.
@@drescherjm Stop buying Seagates.
SSDs have gotten better over the years, except if you have to write a LOT of data to them.
HDs have mostly stagnated, though at a rather high level.
Please.....who buys magnetic hard drives anymore? I can get SSDs much cheaper than a power hungry spinning magnetic disk.
@@ThePolaroid669 You can get an 8TB SSD for CDN $200?
13:08 needs a 2TB chewing gum packet sized nvme next to it, for another 3 orders of magnitude :D
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.
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.
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!_ ;-)😉
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.
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.
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.
Not all modern platters are glass, there are aluminum plates as well
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.
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?
A Time Share company I worked for in the early 1980s rented a 5 MB drive to a customer for $40,000 a month ....
Wtf lmao
Straight robbery
And the 20MB "Hard Card" - so cool.
HDDs no longer need innovation in terms of speed, just in terms of capacity. SSDs can serve as super-speed cache for large capcity HDDs. I remember building my first pc in the 2000s with a 500GB hard drive, then upgrading to 1TB, 4TB, and now 8TB, all for approximately the same dollar cost. Hopefully the trend continues and I can continue to get cheaper and cheaper storage in the future.
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
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.
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.
I read a story of one of the washing machine-size drives being disconnected from power, which caused the drive to remain spinning with the alarming amount of angular momentum it stored being well-preserved. Apparently the truck it was loaded onto took a turn and the entire drive assembly precessed right out the side.
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.
This feels like an HDD post mortem story. I am still using those!
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!_ ;-)😉
I worked for Micropolis. We had an "incredible" 10 megabyte HDD... well, it seemed incredible at the time
I had a 2GB Micropolis drive in the late 90s, as an external SCSI disk on my Mac. :)
@@tookitogo I once owned a pair of Micropolis 3085 drives - used them in RLL quite reliably for years despite them not being "rated" for RLL operation.
I think I might have owned something of theirs a few years later, perhaps a 380MB or 760MB ESDI drive?
There are still evolutions, new alloys used, writing also using lasers and temperature, ever smaller heads, tricks like writing multiple tracks together, etc. .
One mention. The startup hard drive brands, once MFM and RLL 5.25" hard disk were gone, made devices that were mechanically OK, but had a very SLOW data transfer rate, when compared to Seagate...
It's the sound of every computer on TV or in a movie. My first PC had a MFM drive. I
would run defrag on it weekly, that 20MB drive was awesome.
@@JasonCarmichael It's the sound that's hard to capture in the modern era. So few of these drives are left, even though many are operational, not many people can use them. I strive to keep that part of the history alive myself.
@@TheDiskMaster I bought a new 14TB Seagate Exos drive that's filled with helium, at least I can hear it making sound when I use it. Some people complain that's a "bug", I think its a feature.
Seagate is still the best manufacturer.
I miss the sound those old drives made, specially the Quantum Fireball I had when I was a child. Maybe its just nostalgia. I think I'm going to make a virtual emulator board with a speaker that plugs into the SATA and makes the sound for me.
Even thou I have 3 SDDs of 1TB each that are super fast, as I use a lot of VMs on my workstation and I'm a data hoarder and I have a lot of games that I refuse to store in the cloud, I still have 8 mechanical hard drives in my workstation.
(lol, I used to joke that I have more hard drives than the average of my customers' server, well, when they were on-prem, servers usually come with only 6 bays, I had 10 bays on my PC)
@@monad_tcp The sound is part of the experience. Loved the spin up sound at power on. The nature of the sound also gave a feel of what was going on in the system.
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
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.
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!!
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).
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.
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.
What a great watch! Thanks for putting this together, man - excellent work.
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.
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.
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?".
I don't think the HDD is truly dead. I still keep back-ups of mostly pictures, videos and a vast library of books and papers from when I was in college. I know there's another type of long term storage that functions like old cassette tapes, but the downside is that if I wanna access a file from the end of the tape, I have to wait for the tape to physically be accessed; which doesn't happen with HDDs.
I lived near the old Winchester manufacturing facility in south San Jose, they left that land very polluted.
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!
I start my career as a programmer at a bank that had a rule that all apps had to be able to run on a 360/30. The bank had these as backups to their main 360/50s, 65s, 75s. These machines had the 2311 hard drives each the size of a top loading washing machine.
One day I discovered one of these 360/30s siting idle in a dark room. So I sneaked in, powered it up and did some testing. I regularly did this. One day I got so frustrated with my testing that I hit the power off button forgetting to first power down each disk drive and removing the disks. There was a hell of a bang as all the heads suddenly retracted. Goodness knows what damage was caused. I packed the disks away and left the room post haste!
I was here for the entire run of hard drives. I remember single platter cartridges for data general minicomputers. CDC Hawk... I remember at Western Bancorp, in the machine room, a vast array of IBM 3350 units. Maybe a hundred of them. All for the IBM 37 0/195's They had two. I wrote SCSI drivers for the ST506, and the DMA Systems 5+5 5-fixed and 5-removeable. I put the first hard drive on the ACT Apricot. I scavenged a xebec controller and ST506 drive from and old computer and wired the xebec controller to the printer-port, then wrote a custom hard disk driver for Concurrent CP/M that accessed the printer port. All this over the weekend, and what a scene at work on Monday when I showed off my kludge.
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.
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!.😉
Two things come to mind. First, from a mechanical engineering perspective, these things have far more precision than you can imagine, so why does it work at all! The second is how do they last so long! I got my first Mac in 2000. I bought a Maxtor 120gb external and connected it. Worked great. Today it's connected to my latest iMac and it still works perfectly. My other TOSHIBA (2007) laptop has a Hitachi 250GB HD. It's never been turned off, running continuously since 07. (it supplies a background music system)
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.
I sure don't miss my 500gb hitachi "deathstar" deskstar harddrive lmao
99% of all hdds ever produced are already dead. Absolute dogsh1t technology
@@MegaChickenPunchWhat a troll. I still have mine from 2006 PS3 and it still works.
@@MrInuhanyou123 yea yeah post a screenshot of its SMART or cap
@@MegaChickenPunchDid you pull that number out of your ass?
You're probably too young, and think that SSDs should be used for everything.
Well, I've had far more HDD deaths percentage-wise than SSD failures. But I wouldn't go as far as to label it cr@p tech.
It's intriguing that you chose this moment to discuss the "bust" of HDDs, considering that Seagate recently made an announcement about the mass production of HDDs utilizing a groundbreaking technology known as HAMR (Heat-assisted magnetic recording) earlier this year in 2024. This significant development, which Seagate has spent two decades researching, has been hailed as a "game-changing technology" by numerous experts. It appears that you might need to revise your video in the near future to reflect this new information.
Worked at Seagate for a bunch of years and in the industry much longer... I remember HAMR being in development and many of us thought it was a few years away and always would be... glad it's seeing the light of day finally...
I too was surprised he did not mention HAMR which will be great leap in HDD storage, I think now we are a couple of years away from seeing 40-60 TB hdd
I was looking for someone talking about the bust as I have purchased quite a few 10TB drives this year at work. I got 10TB models because they were a great price @ around $90US each for used enterprise HGST He10s in good working condition which I verified with a week of badblocks testing on each drive. With that said I would love to use SSDs instead for our server storage. Maybe when the price of SSDs get down below $200 per 8TB of storage and it doesn't even need to be NVMe.
They had a heck of a time getting them to work right. The first concept heads used an electrostatic mirror to position the laser but every side of the head had to be machined. I remember talking to Phil Gorks at the Rivdrside lab and he was laughing saying, "We made two heads that worked!". Later on they made a bunch of heads and j6st started testing them so see if they could get an outlier. It worked! The winner, when tore down and evaluated was contaminated with a rare element and everyone was sworn to secrecy about what it was.
At least its not SMR. SMR drives was one real nail into HDD coffin recently. To get drive which is both slow and have to be used very carefully and can shift data around on itself (= drive is busy on its own) was really good motivation to say "nope, now SSD only".
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.
Both my parents worked at IBM for years. Mum once described every time a new box of punch cards would be opened, the first thing they would do was to grab a Sharpie and draw a diagonal stripe across the top of the cards... lest the entire box accidentally spill.
g=c800:5 to access the Western Digital formatter from debug. After running Norton Speed Disk to get the best interleave. Ahh the days!
"Speed Disk" was the filesystem defragmenter. "Calibrate" adjusted interleave.
@@JohnDoe4321 Yes thanks you, NC ! Ok after 35+ years I dropped a few bits!
20 yrs ago I managed an IT department, which still had an IBM mainframe. For some reason, even their newer storage units were still refered to as RAMACs.
And today my cell phone holds way more data than all that hardware.
The magnetic paint stuck to the platters by a process nicknamed 'cling-on' - Gene Roddenberry
heard the name at a conference; liking it, he used it in Star Trek.
21:12 I dunno, I think there's still some innovation left to be wrung out of the old magnetic storage corpse. We're just now seeing HAMR after a decade-plus of active product development, and maybe I'll live to see HDMR (heated-dot) after that.
I purchased an Intertech Superbrain in 1980. It had 2 162K floppy drives along with 64K of working memory, and an integrated keyboard and CRT monitor. The price was $3k. I couldn't afford the 5 Mbyte hard disk drive to go along with it, it was another $5.5k. Fast forward. I just purchased a used Dell W7 computer with 8 GB of working memory (expandable to 32 GB) and a 1 TB WD hard drive. The price from a west coast refurbisher: $125.00 with shipping included.
We have affordable computing, you had affordable housing, we are not the same
The tens of thousands of spinning hard drives in the datacenters I service say that the "bust" described here is total BS. Nobody is doing bulk storage with 10 to 1 price ratios on solid state storage.
Thank you. Sure, I've got an SSD in my laptop, but until SSDs cost the same per GB as HDDs, we're still going to be spinning a lot of bits around at high speeds.
When the first digital telephone exchanges were installed, 10 meg HDs were standard. The exchanges had big rooms full of them requiring air conditioning. The failure rate was quite low as they seldom had to stop then restart. Most ran 24/7 for years.
@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
A couple clarifications from someone who was there. Al Shugart wanted to use "Shugart Technology" but Xerox threatened to sue claiming the acquisition included the name. Also, just before Al started Seagate, Shugart had already begun a 5.25 inch project, designing for 10MB on three platters, and based on the same interface (SA 400) as its dominant 5.25 inch floppies. Seagate introduced its two platter 10MB drive before Shugart could, even though it started later, and based it on what it called an ST 506 interface. The OEMs went for it, not only obsoleting Shugart's interface, but beating it in cost. Shugart never recovered. Thanks so much to the authors of this piece.
great info there!
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
FYI, as far as I know, the floppy sizes were never referred to in decimal; it was always 5¼″ (‘five-and-a-quarter inch’) and 3½″ (‘three-and-a-half inch’). Apart from that, as always excellent content.
And yes, I did look for proper primes; I’m a typophilic OCD guy.
In other countries they were referred to in decimal.
3 1/2 inch disks were actually 90 mm, 3 1/2 inches is an imperial approximation.
"Double sided double density"!
@@bryandraughn9830 Drill a hole and HD it was :)
I have seen both the fractional and the decimal sizes being used in USA.
I remember the disk packs and their plastic lids well. My father threw his back out lifting them out of his car trunk in the early 1970s.
I worked for an electronics company in the 90s and all our jackets had wire woven in them.
You used to get in a lot of trouble if you didn't have all the poppers done up though as they acted as a human Faraday cage.
HDDs are still heavily used in data centers. Their ever decreasing cost per MB far outpaces modern SSDs. *THAT* is their downfall in the end-user market. The average computer user, either home or business, has no need for a 20 terabytes of storage. However, smaller capacity SSDs can meet these minimal storage requirements and do it orders of magnitude faster. Being significantly less heavy and shock prone are also bonuses, when it comes to portable devices. I have NVMe and/or SSD drives in all my devices, but I still back everything up to spinning rust.
The problem with SSDs is their limited life time, their sort of 'consumables'. Also I imagine data recovery from a toasted drive is a nightmare.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted Why does this old wives tale persist? Technically, yes. SSDs have limited write cycles before the NAND flash starts to write issues. However, even the *HEAVIEST* disk usage will still provide many, many years of use. You will likely replace your computer several times before the disk even starts to report write errors. Even then, with wear leveling and over-provisioning, you will have years more of use out of them with no loss of capacity or risk of loss of data.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted Most SSDs are warrantied for being able to write hundreds of terabytes of data per TB of capacity. Most people aren't filling their whole drive, erasing it, and repeating often enough for that to be a problem. You also should backup any data you aren't willing to lose. If you're trying to recover data from a failed drive, you've messed up badly.
@@5467nick Well, that not entirely true. For 3D TLC memory general rule is 600 rewrites, so yo get 600TB for 1Tb drive. For QLC this can drop to 100 rewrites and sometimes even less, also amount of data written and NAND write does not match, i seen drives which have almost x2 multiplier.
Its true that resource is BIG but its not infinite and QLC drives, especially cheaper drives from less known brands can fail.
But MLC\TLC - doubtful.
@@iRelevant.47.blacklisted You just need to pick right model. Recently got myself 1Tb MLC drive dirt cheap, it had 70Tb written on it and 100% health. How? Because its resource is magnitude bigger. Just stay away from QLC and you will be fine.
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?
I've actually been in Seagate facility in the states that made drive suspensions. I think this is a rare miss for the channel in terms of context. Perhaps a Part II at some point. The reason there were still facilities in the US is also the reason why the same main players didn't get undercut by up and coming companies from Asia. In the 90s the secret sauce of the company were the drive suspensions. Not just the head. As one engineer explained to me at the time, "Under no circumstances is that IP going overseas to get stolen." There are many who think keeping that IP close to home is why we're still buying Seagate and Western Digital drives and now instead of something from a lower cost Asian competitor. In particular in the 90s when competition was fierce.
I also think there's also there's could be an interesting story around how Hutchinson Technologies (now TDK) had Seagate and others over a barrel on patents in the 90s. Seagate was trying to innovate an alternative to get our from under their thumb back then. My other observation is the ashes of Control Data were still influencing both Seagate and Hutchinson in the 90s.
Also of interesting note, in the 90s Shugart liked to visit the manufacturing and R&D facilities and hold court in the lunch room talking to all the engineers and technicians. He really liked to have a ground level view of what was going on.
And Shugart gave his name to the first industry standard high density (at the time) interface, the SASI (Shugart And Associates Standard Interface). Which later evolved into SCSI, which still exists now in the forms of SATA & SAS.
3600 rpm drives? The last time I actually saw a 3600 rpm drive was the quantum bigfoot.
I have 10k drives online right now, and I think 12k or 15k RPM drives exist? yet there was a line in here about drives "up to 7200 RPM." Sometimes I think these detailed inaccuracies are left for the pedants to bump up the "engagement" numbers. :)
The Bigfoot was 4500RPM. All drives with the SA1000 interface (8" drives) are 3000RPM and all drives with the ST-506/ST-412 interface (most 5.25" and early 3.5" offerings) run at 3600RPM. This also carries over for ESDI drives and many early IDE devices.
@@poofygoof 15K is as high as they ever got, there are 10K drives as well, though. The modern standard is 7200.
@@poofygoof There are 15k drives, mostly enterprise Seagate cheetah and Toshiba/HGST Ultrastar 15k. Good speed, but not very reliable.
@@TheDiskMaster Bigfoot was a mix, the original (no suffix) and CY run at 3600 and the TX and TS are 4000. The most recent 3600 RPM drive I'm aware of is the Fujitsu MEA3320BT, which also happens to be the only 3600 RPM SATA drive I'm aware of.
I`d rather have a hard drive that signals its impending failure than an SSD that just stops right now, irredeemably.
SSDs also support either SMART or a functional equal.
You just have to look at the data they provide.
Used to work at the company that owned the HDD head actuator market, Hutchinson Technology (now owned by TDK). They started to see the writing on the wall back in the early/MID 90s and began to diversify. Once I left the company I no longer followed what they were doing. It still amazes me that a company like Hutchinson Tech was one of the main actuator supplier for the world wide HDD market. Their manufacturing facility in the early/MID 90s was a step above garage manufacturing. But, they pulled it off for many years and rode the bust/boom of the computer world.
Thanks for the trip down memory ( literally) lane and I want to thank you for putting URLs on many images so we can learn more. 👍😎