Half a century of hard drives

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"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 Mini. 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."