The Birth, Boom and Bust of the Hard Disk Drive

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[sedrakpc]

Finally, after all those years now I know why HDD called Winchester. 🤯

[brandonwiles-nt]

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 disks. 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.

[robertharker]

Correction: I was mistaken. The Winchester name did not come from the head actuator. I stand corrected. Should I delete the next paragraph?

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.

[Luckless_Pedestrian]

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.

[artiem]

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."

[jessicamann]

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.

[boppins]

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...

[ElectricEvan]

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.

[fensoxx]

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.

[siberx]

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.

[designengineerdude]

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.

[Jeremy-flxt]

Such great content! In the 90's there was at least one adjacent worksite between Maxtor and Seagate (in Longmont Colorado which is close to Boulder that I sometimes see in videos). In the late 90's I worked at one of them on their pilot line. There were some couples with one spouse working for Seagate, and the other spouse working for Maxtor, which I thought was interesting. I even heard one guy pretended to "steal" his wife's car when he took visitors to lunch in order to try to show thriftiness vs. the other companies lavishness that their employees can afford nice cars. I wonder if the visitors bought any of it.

[cedriclynch]

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.

[ztoob]

18:55 - the anti-static lab coats didn't have wires, but carbon-impregnated threads, conductive enough to dissipate static, but not enough to create a shock hazard. Similarly, grounding straps have ~1 Meg-ohm resistors in series so your body isn't subjected to high currents if you grab a live wire.

[rdlg]

stayed in Mn next to the Seagate factory, it sits on the aptly named "Disk Drive".

[jschudel]

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).

[stevestarcke]

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!

[alexandruraresdatcu]

10:50 7200 RPM was for the most common HDDS but there were also 10k and 15k RPMS for low latency applications (servers).

[dewiz]

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

[David_Best]

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.