Thursday, April 05, 2007
The disk drive: 50 years of progress and technology innovation: the road to two billion drives
50 Years of Hard Disk Drives
A Golden Anniversary
It seems like only yesterday. You remember yesterday, a storage world filled with clunky metal monsters hoarding bits the way banks hoarded cash--and just as inflexibly. IBM changed all that with hard disk drive development starting in 1952, and first products two years later.
In this issue, we take a look back from the point of view of the creators themselves--as well as providing a timeline of what has passed, and some hints at what will come.
CTR celebrates "The Golden Anniversary of HDD" beginning on page 8.
The hard magnetic digital disk drive, as we know it today, is used in all computer applications--in home appliances and PVR/DVRs, in automobiles, cameras, and medical applications. It is now pervasive in all segments of our society. The technology got its start in IBM's San Jose laboratories in 1952, with innovators such as Rey Johnson, Dr. Al Hoagland, Al Shugart and Bobby Smith, among others. The disk drive is unique in its history for overall cost reductions, while at the same time fostering rapid technology growth, and reaping amazing production ramps. Success in this industry has been associated with:
* Device size reduction
As a result of these accomplishments, the industry has grown from a volume of several thousand disk drives per year in the 1950s to over 260 million drives per year in 2003. The first digital hard disk drive was the 24-inch IBM 350-1, which was announced in 1955 and began shipping in 1956. This drive housed fifty 24-inch disks, had an access time of 600 milliseconds, and a capacity of 5.0 megabytes. Table 1 compares the specs on the 350 with the most recent Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 disk drive of 2003.
During this same period of time and due to the technology and production volumes, the cost of magnetic disk storage has decreased from $2,057 per megabyte in the 1960s to $.005 today--and the price per MB will continue to decrease in the future (Table 2).
The yearly volume demand of disk drives has, with the exception of 2001, increased each year since the late 1970s. Figure 1 shows the annual production of disk drives by form factor from 1975-2004. This data was gathered yearly by Disk/Trend to 1999, and by Peripheral Research and Coughlin Associates from 2000 on.
Sometime during the third quarter of 2004, the disk drive industry will reach a historical cumulative shipment level of 2 billion disk drives, and will reach the 3.5 billion mark within the next 3.5 years. The fastest growing segment in disk drive unit growth is for consumer electronic applications. Consumer electronics (CE) disk drives will approach the numbers of disk drives used for conventional desktop computer applications by 2010.
To accomplish these volumes, technology feats and production numbers, the disk drive industry grew in number of participant companies from, initially, IBM and a few other early companies to approximately 136 competing companies in the mid 1980s. Due to intense competition and price wars, industry consolidation has decreased this number to the nine companies that exist in 2004 (see Tables 3,4 and 5). Of these nine companies, two are recent start-up companies focusing on the small disk drives for the Consumer Electronics markets (Cornice and GS MagicStor).
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