A half century of hard drives

Crown Zellerbach, at one time a major paper producer in San Francisco, was the first company to install a RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) machine, the first IBM computer with a then-newfangled piece of storage technology called a hard drive, according to Jim Porter, president of analysis firm Disk/Trend. The RAMAC--officially announced on Sept. 13, 1956--weighed 1 ton and stored 5MB of data on 50 spinning platters, 24 inches in diameter.

Porter worked at Crown, which got the RAMAC because the company delivered a lot of computer card stock to IBM.

"Any time we had a business guest, they wanted to see it, so I'd take them three levels below Market Street to the computer room. You could see the head assembly moving back and forth. It put on a good show," Porter recalled. "I showed it off dozens of times."

A lot has changed in the last 50 years. Manufacturers now sell drives that hold 750GB, or 150,000 times more data than the RAMAC, but they weigh only a few ounces and measure just 3.5 inches across. Drives that can hold a terabyte will be announced late this year or early next year.

"The hard drive has advanced about 65 million times in areal density since the RAMAC, and we're still, in my estimation, three orders of magnitude from any truly fundamental limits," said Mark Kryder, chief technical officer of drive maker Seagate Technology.

Hard drives, moreover, have become pervasive. Between 1992 and 2003, roughly 1.5 billon drives shipped, capable of holding 41,400 exabytes, according to the "How Much Information?" study from the University of California at Berkeley. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Five exabytes would be enough to store all human speech since the dawn of time through 2002, according to the study. More data is stored on hard drives than on optical drives, paper or other media, according to the study.

This year, about 450 million to 460 million drives will leave factories, according to Disk/Trend.

The growth, in part, has derived from the seemingly never-ending demand for servers, PCs and data storage--as well as by a successful effort by drive makers to diversify outside of the PC market. High-end TVs come with built-in drives, while Toyota Motor and Mercedes-Benz are planning to embed hard drive-based navigation and entertainment systems into luxury cars, according to Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

TiVo-like digital video recorders wouldn't be possible without hard drives; home servers stocked with videos and music could be the next must-have item. Drives are also replacing tape drives for more permanent data storage, Healy added.

"I don't remember a time when the money was rolling in. It has always been a tough field, hasn't it?"

--Al Shugart, founder, Seagate Technology

The realities of the drive industry--high capital costs, rapid technology changes, lots of competition, penny-pinching customers, short product life spans--have always made survival tough.

At the mid-1980s peak, 76 companies, including outfits such as Seiko and Citizen Watch, were churning out drives, according to Disk/Trend.

"Now, if you count very carefully, you'll find eight--and some of those are very small," Porter said. The top three makers--Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi--account for about 75 percent of drives shipped. Life at the top, though, isn't easy. Although Seagate and Western Digital are currently profitable, Hitachi has experienced some unprofitable quarters recently, and margins for all companies remain tight.

"I don't remember a time when the money was rolling in," joked Al Shugart, who was one of the engineers on the RAMAC and went on to found Seagate. "It has always been a tough field, hasn't it?"

Much of the credit for the design of the drive goes to Reynold Johnson. IBM sent him to San Jose, Calif., in 1952 to develop a magnetic storage system in which data could be recorded or retrieved directly from any part of the medium. In tape systems, you need to rewind or fast-forward to get to a particular point of data.

At the time, many thought of devising a magnetic cylinder. The problem with cylinders, though, is surface area: A cylinder capable of holding 5MB of data with the materials at the time would have been at least 17 feet long. Johnson came up with the idea of stacking magnetic disks, said Al Hoagland, who runs the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center and worked on the RAMAC with Johnson. (For the record, the RAMAC 305 was the computer system that contained the first drive. The 350 was the name of the actual drive array attached to the RAMAC 305.)

"The approach Rey Johnson pursued was unique in the industry," Hoagland said. "It wasn't obvious. The multiple disk stack on the RAMAC gives roughly 240 square feet of recording area. Any time you slice something really thin, you get two new surfaces."

To get data out of a stack of disks, though, Johnson's team had to develop heads that could move up and down the stack without touching the disks. It also had to figure out how to synchronize various processes. "There were a lot of things that were a total departure," Hoagland said.

Besides giving IBM the lead in drives, the invention of RAMAC also prompted IBM to erect its drive factory in San Jose because the company realized that the expertise couldn't be easily replicated elsewhere, according to Hoagland. Although it ultimately sold its hard-drive business to Hitachi, Big Blue became one of the biggest employers and largest landowners in what would become Silicon Valley.

Despite a constant string of buyouts and power shifts in the tech industry, the level of competition in the drive business hasn't changed much over the decades. Drive makers' latest challenge is flash memory.

The drive industry scored a coup in 2001, when Apple Computer put a 1.8-inch Toshiba drive into the first iPod. Apple also became the first company to adopt 1-inch microdrives on a wide scale with the iPod Nano. Now microdrives are on their way out.

"The 1-inch volumes have come down significantly, impacted severely by flash. Right now, we are looking for a new application for the 1-inch (drive)," Healy said.

"The 1-inch volumes have come down significantly, impacted severely by flash. Right now, we are looking for a new application for the 1-inch (drive)."

--Bill Healy, SVP of product strategy and marketing, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

To survive, drive makers have begun to integrate vertically, producing components such as heads and disks themselves rather than buying them from third-party vendors. It's a completely different tack than the rest of the IT industry. But by bringing things in-house, manufacturers can better control production and quality.

They can also introduce innovations more rapidly.

To build up or defend sales, manufacturers are looking for ways to enhance their drives, such as simplifying data encryption processes. The security angle will likely come in handy in the next battleground with flash: notebooks. In the next few years, flash will first appear in small notebooks targeted at vertical markets such as defense, according to executives of flash-producing companies.

Hitachi's Healy, among others, scoffs at the idea of flash notebooks hitting the mainstream anytime soon. "As a buyer, someone is going to try to convince you to buy something with 30GB of storage when, for a few dollars more, you can buy something with a 160GB hard drive," he said.

Despite the tough financial circumstances of the drive world, the technology has aged well. Drive makers have generally managed to double the capacity of their products every couple of years for decades. (That's on pace with Moore's Law, but the underlying principles are different.) During the late '90s, capacity was doubling nearly every year.

Perpendicular recording, in which bits are stacked on top of each other on a platter, may enable drive makers to once again accelerate the density growth rate over the next few years. However, the method's benefits likely will begin to slow down circa 2010, when drives are set to be capable of storing 500 gigabits to 1 terabit per square inch.

At that point, industry players will have to introduce drives based on new technology to continue the pace of progress. Without changes, further increases in density will cause drives to lose data at room temperature.

Hitachi favors adopting patterned media. In this technique, recording film on a drive is segmented into pattered dots. This prevents one bit, or dot, from flipping its neighbor. Seagate, on the other hand, favors heat-assisted recording. In this method, a laser inside the drive heats the platters to record or erase data; at room temperature, the platters are inert.

Although both techniques will eventually be incorporated into drives, it remains unclear which one will come next. Ultimately, the decision could turn on which technology looks easier to bring to mass-manufacturing.

"You've got to figure out how to do this not just in a lab demonstration, but by producing them in the hundreds of millions," said Porter of Disk/Trend. "The good news is that you have people working in both of these camps and maybe others. There's nano this and nano that."

No matter which technology innovation makes it to market first, the end for hard drives is not near.

"We can see 50 (terabits) to 100 terabits (per square inch) being possible," Seagate's Kryder said. "Mother Nature has provided us with a technology that is scalable to very, very high densities, so you just keep working at the problem with enough engineers, and you make progress on it steadily."