A History of Hard Disk Drives (and How They Work)

- Ever wondered what was inside of that clunky brick on which you store most of your Steam games and general files? A lot goes into a hard disk drive, and even more is found in its history. HDDs were once the size of refrigerators, and now they're as small as a quarter (with several hundred times the storage capacity)! Let's jump back in time.

Subscribe to our channel!

Thanks for learning with us!

[GregSalazar]

Correction: the Deskstar Titan 16GP was the first 3.5 inch HDD to utilize GMR, but it was not the first 3.5 inch drive. That title belongs to the Rodime RO352 in 1983, which stored a substantial 10MB onto two platters.

[thor]

Funny just when you were saying it would not be boring. I was thinking this sounds boring. Glad I stuck around for you to prove me wrong... Thanks as always.

[samf]

Appreciate how you pay attention to small details.
1:09 "5 Million Bytes or using the DECIMAL System 5MB"
Subbed for Life!

[Ivop]

I really liked this video. This is good old classic youtube, 5min brief and informative. ¡Thank you!

[HelloKittyFanMan]

'd love to have one that goes into all the detail about fixed vs. removability, cartridge and drive types, platter sizes, radial vs. swinging head arms, and stepper vs. voice-coil actuators and the reasons for switching (I know that speed issues were why they developed the voice-coil version, but I still don't know about radial vs. swing), and controller and format types, along with what you went over here. Yes, I know, that would blow it up to probably something more along the lines of 2 hours and I would definitely buckle in, sit back, and watch all of that (either all at once or in segments)!

[XxViciousxX]

This was really cool I enjoyed it. Even leaned a few things.

[alexthesniper]

Nice history lesson professor science studio.

[francopellegrin]

I've watched at least 4 of your videos within 2 hours, now I'll constantly hear that one song of yours in my











Not hate just making jokes.

[machdaddy]

When I worked at 3M I got to work with the IBM Magstar, because we made the tapes for them. It was quit a beast in its time. Also got to work with PDP-11s, because we made the DLT cartridges for the TK50 tape drives. The PDP-11 computers had a hard drive with fourteen inch removable hard disk packs. Interesting times. 3M also made a hard drive with 8-inch platters, with a capacity of 60 megabytes..

[HelloKittyFanMan]

Also, let's see if you can make an experimental construction of a floppy drive that uses one pair of swinging hard disk heads to try to operate the floppy disk (especially with the jacket still on, even if you have to cut the access hole a little wide in order to accommodate the swing-head arc!

[FrankieHiltz]

I'm gonna buy one of those IBM drives just so I can legitimately tell people I've got a Titan in my rig.
Seriously though, it's pretty incredible what we can do when you think about it. The jump in the last 10 years is phenomenal in terms of technology. I wonder if there will ever be a day where physics makes it literally impossible to progress any further. Great video :D

[SimplyChem]

Extremely fascinating video! Thanks for the post!!

[jsh]

Excellent video! More detail next time? For those of us with longer attention spans than a 6 second vine clip.

[viticoe]

Well Done... Great Videos.. the history ones and builds, benchmark and recomendations...

[daniel]

I can't understand why this guy don't have a million subscribers...

[Compaq]

Wow what a great video :) Thanks m8. I'm going to hold a presentation about HDD's in school next monday :)
This helped me a lot!

[jeanlannes]

Hi! i discovered your channel yesterday and i must say your content is really interesting you deserve more subscribers ! Keep it up!

[secrets]

I hate everything about life, but I just can't dislike the video...

[xmainsoulx]

that was awesome, I'd love if you made more videos like this. More power to ya man.

[TheOfficialStal]

Nice work. I already knew the history but it was an interesting recap nevertheless. :)