Talk:History of hard disk drives

message: Why is the Micropolis 5.25" 650MB drive listed in '93?  DEC had a 5.25" 1.3GB drive (the RZ58) in early '92. 208.66.208.200 18:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: agreed, why don't u edit the page.  It would be nice if you had a reference to the announcement/shipment Tom94022 20:00, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  First 650 MB drive 

message: "2007 - 300 terabit hard drives are said to come in 2010.[6]" was added to the chronology; however a search of the Seagate web site reveals no such announcement.  Furthermore, the author of the underlying article has no apparent qualifications for his announcement nor does he cite his source.  I have asked for a clarification and assuming I don't get one, will remove this citation in about a week.  Any objections? Tom94022 20:00, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: No Such 300 Tb Seagate Drive? 

message: Do they use a dedicated power source like 3.5-inch hdd, or is the power supplied through the ide connection? Terranitup 18:33, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is a hybrid 44 pin connectorhttp://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confNote-c.html consisting of the 40 pin IDE connector plus 4 power pins, for example [Toshiba  MK1233GAS].  The earliest 2.5" drives had a separate connector but it was a pin header type connector and not the washing machine connectors like the 3.5" and earlier drives.  Tom94022 17:11, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: How are 2.5-inch hdd powered?

message: When did these go into production? I have a 3.5" WD Caviar from 1992 (80MB!!!), and from experience they seem to be pretty commonplace in desktops by around then. --Zilog Jones 17:50, 19 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The first 3.5" HDD was the Rodime RO350 family which went into production in 1983; it was not very successful.  The first really successful 3.5" HDD was the Conner CP340 family which went into production in 1987Tom94022 21:14, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was searching for a reference, and the Rodime page doesn't provide any, but in the article History of IBM magnetic disk drives I found this reference  that says "First 3.5 inch rigid disk drive - 1983 Rodime RO 352 – 10 Megabytes, two 3.5" disk". Ignacio.Agulló (talk) 02:43, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  3.5" disks 

message: In the PC era section, there should be mention of the drive size limits, unless this is in another article? already.
* 32MB FAT-12 limit / 128MB 4 entry Partition Table
* 512MB CHS/DOS limit
* 2GB 16bit limit
* 8GB CHS/LBA mapping limit
etc...
132.205.44.134 21:54, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  drive limitations 

message: Yr edit to the HDD history page is incorrect in calling the use of Winchester "unsourced nonsense."   The statement is not sourced but it is not nonsense.  I refer you, for example, to "Winchester drives to be focus of attention over next two years," J Trifari, MiniMicro Systems, Februrary 1982, p 135-143, or the MiniMicro February 1981 edition which has eight articles regarding HDD's using "Winchester" generically and a cover that states, "Disk Drives: Diversification in Winchesters, Maturity in Floppies ...".  A casual review on the technical and business literature of the early 1980's will find many instances of the use of Winchester drive as a generic for what we today most commonly call hard disk drive.  Why it dropped from use in the late 1980's is an interesting question, but the statement is not nonsense.  However, I don't think the statement adds much to the article so I didn't undo your reversion but I thought u might like to know of its factual basis.  Tom94022 (talk) 05:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the references. Maybe nonsense was too strong a word, but I think we have be very careful with such statements, since people who were not around at the time may take them as gospel. The sentence I removed was "During the 1980s, the term "Winchester" became a common description for all hard disk drives, though generally falling out of use during the 1990s." That's not true. The term Winchester was used to distinguish disk drives where the heads and actuators were in a sealed assembly along with the platters. This was a novel notion at the time as removable platter hard drives, patterned after the IBM 1311, predominated. As this design came to be universal, there was no need for Winchester and it dropped out of use. --agr (talk) 16:02, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: IMO "sealed" is not a distinguishing characteristic.  There were cartridge "Winchester" disk drives such as the SyQuest SQ306, DMA Systems MicroMagnum5, etc.  There was even an ANSI standard cartridge using "Winchester" technology.  Nor do I believe it to be true in the early 1980's that there were any drives announced using the older technology exemplified by 1311 descendants such as CDC's SMD.  Finally, by the early 1980's Winchester was being used to describe drives with technology beyond Winchester such as Watrous flexures, smaller sliders, two rail sliders, etc.  So I suggest in the early 1980's Winchester was universally used to describe any disk drive having low mass, low load heads on lubricated media, that is, all disk drives then being announced. My guess is the hard disk drive then came into use with the growth of PC's as a way of distinguishing them from the more universal flopppy disk drive. Tom94022 (talk) 17:39, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that Winchester describes a set of disk technologies. We can put aside the question of exactly what those technologies were. The term Winchester drive refers to a disk drive the embodies those technologies.  It was mainly used to distinguish those disk drives from earlier, removable pack technologies. It wasn't a synonym for anything. Ultimately Winchester technology completely replaced the removable pack technology. Maybe that transition was over by 1980 as you say; I'd put it a couple of years later. I also agree that the term hard drive was introduced to distinguish them from floppy drives. I just did a search of Google Groups usenet archive. There is just one message referring to "hard drive" in 1983. Afterwards it becomes common.  Prior to that the term used is simply disk drive. If anything, hard drive is a later synonym for Winchester disk drive.--agr (talk) 23:20, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: According to the 1984 Disk/Trend report (the earliest I have) 1983 unit shipments were 136.8 k removable media and 1,347.7 k "Fixed Disk Drives." Many, perhaps half, of those removable media products were "Winchester."  FWIW, I did a Dialog search on Winchester from 1980-1985 and got 44 valid hits, in the early years, Winchester is in the articles title without qualification; however in the latter years the article titles use Rigid or Hard.  My MiniMicro citations above are similar examples.  In all of these cases, people are using the term Winchester as a synonym for what we now call Hard Disk Drive.  I don't think that the fact that there were less than 10% obsolescent non-Winchester's around changes that Tom94022 (talk) 18:16, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think there is much disagreement here. From their inception through the early 1980s, storage devices with rigid, spinning platters were simply known as "disk drives."  Wincheseter drives were a type of disk drive, based on technology introduced by IBM in the late 70s. That technology came to dominate the industry by 1983 or so. The term "hard disk drive" appears about 1984 in the personal computer market and is a reaction to "floppy disk drive" which is what the public was used to seeing. So, if anything, "hard drive" is a layer synonym for Winchester drive. --agr (talk) 15:35, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The way I recall it, the term Winchester quickly fell out of fashion among early PC users because if you said that your new computer had a Winchester, you ran the risk of being asked "What's a Winchester?" and having to respond "well, uh, I don't really know, I guess it's just some fancy kind of disk drive".  I knew plenty of people who could define RTL or ECL, but most of us were pretty vague on Winchester.  Generally, we didn't know if it was a brand, a technology, an interface, a device class, or just a Shugart/IBM marketing conceit.  Among the PC crowd I don't think Winchester was ever a conceptual synonym for anything.  At best people were aping the term with no comprehension, perhaps from some early IBM PC marketing brochure.  Within the crowd, the lingo tended to be "I just picked up a new five-and-a-quarter" or "dude, you need to junk that old full-height".  While Byte would write articles about "new hard drive technologies" the actual devices were mostly referenced by form-factor, capacity, or interface (SCSI/ESDI/ATA).  Sometimes it was more generic such as "Sounds like your hard drive is having a head crash" or more pompous "My new $5000 machine has a 10MB Winchester."  If anything, Winchester was a functional synonym for unaffordable for as long as it persisted. MaxEnt (talk) 04:38, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

text: Apparently, the term is not as dead as I presumed.  From MySQL Database Sensei Brian 'Krow' Aker "New media like this is all about caching. Winchester drives were brought in to speed up the data transfer for hot data. They acted as a caching layer between tape and main memory. Solid state drives will do the same for databases."   Perhaps Winchester is making a comeback as an antonym for solid state.  MaxEnt (talk) 20:34, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:   Winchester as an euphanism for hard disk drives 

message: :Discussion was archived at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard/Archive 3#History of hard disk drives - 1950s through 1990s – Wbm1058 (talk) 13:58, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion at [[Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard]]

message: *James N. Porter died March 2, 2012.  He was the first full time digital storage analyst and founded Disk/Trend in 1977, publisher of market studies of the disk drive and data storage industries, per Tom Coughlin, A Silent Voice: James Porter, Dean of Storage Analysts Dies, Forbes, 3/06/2012.
*Perhaps the last conference that he was booked at was Storage Visions 2012 Conference, Jan. 8–9, 2012.
*His website www.disktrend.com has gone, but thanks to archive.org, which last recorded a snapshot on July 26, 2011, we can still link to it.  In my opinion, this is a reliable tertiary source, which ideally should be supported by additional references to contemporary news items reporting each industry first.
====External links====
* DISK/TREND home page web.archive.org
* Selected storage topics of special interest to the disk drive industry
* Five decades of disk drive industry firsts, DISK/TREND, Inc., publisher of market studies of the worldwide disk drive and data storage industries. web.archive.org
* "An Historical Perspective of the Disk Drive Industry," James N. Porter, DISK/TREND,  Mountain View CA, Presented at the THIC Meeting at the Sony Auditorium, San Jose CA, April 19-20, 2005
—Wbm1058 (talk) 18:34, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Jim Porter, Disk/Trend, and the web page "Five decades of disk drive industry firsts"

message: * DISK/TREND home page web.archive.org
* Selected storage topics of special interest to the disk drive industry
* Five decades of disk drive industry firsts, DISK/TREND, Inc., publisher of market studies of the worldwide disk drive and data storage industries. web.archive.org
* "An Historical Perspective of the Disk Drive Industry," James N. Porter, DISK/TREND,  Mountain View CA, Presented at the THIC Meeting at the Sony Auditorium, San Jose CA, April 19-20, 2005
—Wbm1058 (talk) 18:34, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: External links

message: I'll just leave this here...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/17/seagate-confirms-3tb-hard-drive-for-2010-possible-3/
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/29/seagate-busts-out-3tb-external-hard-drive-for-250/
24.151.31.39 (talk) 13:04, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  3TB 

message: Been so long, the terminology is slipping from me, so, if I'm using the wrong terms anywhere, by all means, please apply the correct ones. I was a software guy, not a hardware one.
As I recall the transition of hard drives from using the early style "slider" (directly in and out on a line through the center of the spin axis) of the head actuator mechanism to the more modern "radial" armatures (in which the head moves on an arc across the disc surface roughly perpendicular to the spinning drive) was a major development. I seem to recall that this mechanism could be controlled much more accurately, allowing a substantial boost in track density, and thus a notable increase in drive capacity. I'd suggest this development is worth mentioning in the timeline of key events.
--OBloodyHell (talk) 18:22, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It is called Rotary Actuator and is indeed worthy of mention, the first being probably the hydraulically actuated Bryant 320 circa 1960.  Bryant's follow-on the model 4000 was definitely hydraulic.  The first electronic rotary actuators shipped in 1975, they were the StorageTek Superdisk and the IBM 62GV (Gulliver), this is taken from IBM 62GV / STC 8800 Super Disk which I moderate.  FWIW, this and many other significant technologies and products were referenced by a link in the History of hard disk drives Timeline section to Porter's Five decades of disk drive industry firsts but the Wiki thought police took out the reference on the theory that somehow the section would be better without the link.  Beats me Tom94022 (talk) 20:12, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Key Developments": Radial Armature Development 

message: Why was the article renamed? Mikebar (talk) 16:36, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no justification and I am moving it back.  No one used "hard-disk"!!!! Tom94022 (talk) 22:45, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Article move??

message: Given that we also have an article on IBM drives alone, it's surprising to see how little coverage there is here for non-IBM work. Particularly non US work.  IBM dominated in the early years, but through the '70s companies like DEC were just as important.
Although a dead end (as they couldn't use removable media), what about the giant platter drives? Some of these were around 4' wide. What about UK makers?   Andy Dingley (talk) 09:04, 26 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lack of non-IBM coverage 

message: When did the voice coil actuator make its debut? How long did stepper motor driven heads hang on after? Bizzybody (talk) 11:16, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  First voice coil head actuator? 

message: How much $ per megabyte, when? More useful information in this chart. http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm Bizzybody (talk) 11:20, 8 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  A useful chart 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: To some extent coming to this article for the first time I was (also) expecting to be able to see an evolution of HDD form factor and a discussion on the evolution of interfaces ... (ST506 (MFM/RLL) ... actually they are a recording technique from memory), IDE, ATA SATA, USB .... and perhaps more in a prose narrative than an absolute timeline.  Put simply I wonder whether the following sections would be interesting in narrative:
* Evolution of disk form factor
* Evolution of disk interfaces (and controllers)
* Rise of the SDD and decline of the HDD
:* Would need a better title, discussing price/performance capacity, reliability, lifetime, power consumption of each and how the use of the SDD is increasing and the HDD decreasing.
Just a thought ... I'm not doing anything myself.  Djm-leighpark (talk) 07:06, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is just a chronological list of events subordinate to the main article and IMO really wouldn't benefit from such narratives.  Such narratives are in already in the main article, i.e., Form Factors and interfaces and both have more detail in linked articles such as Hard disk drive interface.  I agree that major changes in technology (such as interfaces) and major changes in machine design (such as form factors) should be enumerated herein but associated narratives should be left to their main articles.  As far as SSD vs HDD that is well coverred in their respective articles but there might be a few milestones to be added to this list article, e.g., SSD revenue first exceeded HDD revenue and SSD annual unit shipment first exceeded HDD annual unit shipment. Tom94022 (talk) 17:35, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Form factor and disk interfaces 

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thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion