Hard disk drives were introduced in 1956, as data storage for an IBM real-time transaction

processing computer and were developed for use with general-

purpose mainframe and minicomputers. The first IBM drive, the 350 RAMAC in 1956, was
approximately the size of two medium-sized refrigerators and stored five million six-bit characters
(3.75 megabytes)[12] on a stack of 50 disks.[26]

In 1962 the IBM 350 RAMAC disk storage unit was superseded by the IBM 1301 disk storage
unit,[27] which consisted of 50 platters, each about 1/8-inch thick and 24 inches in
diameter.[28] Whereas the IBM 350 used only two read/write heads which were pneumatically
actuated[26] and moved in two dimensions, the 1301 was one of the first disk storage units to use an
array of heads, one per platter, moving as a single unit. Cylinder-mode read/write operations were
supported, and the heads flew about 250 micro-inches (about 6 m) above the platter surface.
Motion of the head array depended upon a binary adder system of hydraulic actuators which
assured repeatable positioning. The 1301 cabinet was about the size of three home refrigerators
placed side by side, storing the equivalent of about 21 million eight-bit bytes. Access time was about
a quarter of a second.
Also in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, which was about the size of a washing
machine and stored two million characters on a removable disk pack. Users could buy additional
packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape. Later models of
removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became the norm in most computer installations and
reached capacities of 300 megabytes by the early 1980s. Non-removable HDDs were called "fixed
disk" drives.

Some high-performance HDDs were manufactured with one head per track (e.g. IBM 2305 in 1970)
so that no time was lost physically moving the heads to a track.[29] Known as fixed-head or head-per-
track disk drives they were very expensive and are no longer in production.[30]

In 1973, IBM introduced a new type of HDD code-named "Winchester". Its primary distinguishing
feature was that the disk heads were not withdrawn completely from the stack of disk platters when
the drive was powered down. Instead, the heads were allowed to "land" on a special area of the disk
surface upon spin-down, "taking off" again when the disk was later powered on. This greatly reduced
the cost of the head actuator mechanism, but precluded removing just the disks from the drive as
was done with the disk packs of the day. Instead, the first models of "Winchester technology" drives
featured a removable disk module, which included both the disk pack and the head assembly,
leaving the actuator motor in the drive upon removal. Later "Winchester" drives abandoned the
removable media concept and returned to non-removable platters.

Like the first removable pack drive, the first "Winchester" drives used platters 14 inches (360 mm) in
diameter. A few years later, designers were exploring the possibility that physically smaller platters
might offer advantages. Drives with non-removable eight-inch platters appeared, and then drives
that used a 5 14 in (130 mm) form factor (a mounting width equivalent to that used by
 Improvement of HDD characteristics over time

Parameter Started with (1956) Developed to (2017) Improvement

Capacity 3.2-million-to-
3.75 megabytes[12] 12 terabytes[13]
(formatted) one[14]

Physical volume 68 cubic feet(1.9 m3)[c][6] 2.1 cubic inches(34 cm3)[15][d] 56,000-to-one[16]

Weight 2,000 pounds(910 kg)[6] 2.2 ounces (62 g)[15][e] 15,000-to-one[17]

Average access 2.5 ms to 10 ms; RW RAM about

approx. 600 milliseconds[6]
time dependant 200-to-one[18]

US$9,200 per megabyte US$0.032 per gigabyte by 300-million-to-

Price
(1961) [19]
2015 [20]
one[21]

1.3 terabits per square inch in 650-million-to-

Data density 2,000 bits persquare inch[22]
2015[23] one[24]

Average
~2000 hrs MTBF[citation needed] ~22500 hrs MTBF[citation needed] 11-to-one[25]
lifespan
A modern HDD records data by magnetizing a thin film of ferromagnetic material[f] on a disk.
Sequential changes in the direction of magnetization represent binary data bits. The data is read
from the disk by detecting the transitions in magnetization. User data is encoded using an encoding
scheme, such as run-length limited encoding,[g] which determines how the data is represented by the
magnetic transitions.

A typical HDD design consists of a spindle that holds flat circular disks, also called platters, which
hold the recorded data. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy,
glass, or ceramic, and are coated with a shallow layer of magnetic material typically 1020 nm in
depth, with an outer layer of carbon for protection.[33][34][35] For reference, a standard piece of copy
paper is 0.070.18 millimeters (70,000180,000 nm).[36]

The platters in contemporary HDDs are spun at speeds varying from 4,200 rpm in energy-efficient
portable devices, to 15,000 rpm for high-performance servers.[38] The first HDDs spun at
1,200 rpm[6] and, for many years, 3,600 rpm was the norm.[39] As of December 2013, the platters in
most consumer-grade HDDs spin at either 5,400 rpm or 7,200 rpm.[40]

Information is written to and read from a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write
heads that are positioned to operate very close to the magnetic surface, with their flying heightoften
in the range of tens of nanometers. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the
magnetization of the material passing immediately under it.

In modern drives, there is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a
common arm. An actuator arm (or access arm) moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across
the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it
spins. The arm is moved using a voice coil actuator or in some older designs a stepper motor. Early
hard disk drives wrote data at some constant bits per second, resulting in all tracks having the same
amount of data per track but modern drives (since the 1990s) use zone bit recording increasing the
write speed from inner to outer zone and thereby storing more data per track in the outer zones.

In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state
might be lost because of thermal effects, thermally induced magnetic instability which is commonly
known as the "superparamagnetic limit". To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel
magnetic layers, separated by a 3-atom layer of the non-magnetic element ruthenium, and the two
layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other.[41] Another technology
used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is perpendicular recording, first
shipped in 2005,[42] and as of 2007 the technology was used in many HDDs.[43][44][45]

In 2004, a new concept was introduced to allow further increase of the data density in magnetic
recording, using recording media consisting of coupled soft and hard magnetic layers. That so-
called exchange spring media, also known as exchange coupled composite media, allows good
writability due to the write-assist nature of the soft layer. However, the thermal stability is determined
only by the hardest layer and not influenced by the soft layer.[46][47]

A typical HDD has two electric motors; a spindle motor that spins the disks and an actuator (motor)
that positions the read/write head assembly across the spinning disks. The disk motor has an
external rotor attached to the disks; the stator windings are fixed in place. Opposite the actuator at
the end of the head support arm is the read-write head; thin printed-circuit cables connect the read-
write heads to amplifier electronics mounted at the pivot of the actuator. The head support arm is
very light, but also stiff; in modern drives, acceleration at the head reaches 550 g.

The actuator is a permanent magnet and moving coil motor that swings the heads to the desired
position. A metal plate supports a squat neodymium-iron-boron (NIB) high-flux magnet. Beneath this
plate is the moving coil, often referred to as the voice coil by analogy to the coil inloudspeakers,
which is attached to the actuator hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the
bottom plate of the motor (some drives have only one magnet).

The voice coil itself is shaped rather like an arrowhead, and made of doubly coated coppermagnet
wire. The inner layer is insulation, and the outer is thermoplastic, which bonds the coil together after
it is wound on a form, making it self-supporting. The portions of the coil along the two sides of the
arrowhead (which point to the actuator bearing center) then interact with themagnetic field of the
fixed magnet. Current flowing radially outward along one side of the arrowhead and radially inward
on the other produces the tangential force. If the magnetic field were uniform, each side would
generate opposing forces that would cancel each other out. Therefore, the surface of the magnet is
half north pole and half south pole, with the radial dividing line in the middle, causing the two sides of
the coil to see opposite magnetic fields and produce forces that add instead of canceling. Currents
along the top and bottom of the coil produce radial forces that do not rotate the head.

The HDD's electronics control the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk, and perform
reads and writes on demand from the disk controller. Feedback of the drive electronics is
accomplished by means of special segments of the disk dedicated to servofeedback. These are
either complete concentric circles (in the case of dedicated servo technology), or segments
interspersed with real data (in the case of embedded servo technology). The servo feedback
optimizes the signal to noise ratio of the GMR sensors by adjusting the voice-coil of the actuated
arm. The spinning of the disk also uses a servo motor. Modern disk firmware is capable of
scheduling reads and writes efficiently on the platter surfaces and remapping sectors of the media
which have failed.
Hard disk drive

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive or fixed disk[b] is a data storage device that
uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information using one or more rigid rapidly
rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads,
usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces.[2] Data
is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or
retrieved in any order and not onlysequentially. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining
stored data even when powered off.[3][4][5]

Introduced by IBM in 1956,[6] HDDs became the dominant secondary storage device for general-
purpose computers by the early 1960s. Continuously improved, HDDs have maintained this position
into the modern era of servers and personal computers. More than 200 companies have produced
HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most current units are manufactured
by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. As of 2016, HDD production (in bytes per year) is
growing, although unit shipments and sales revenues are declining. The primary competing
technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), which
have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability,[7] and much lower
latency and access times.[8][9][10][11] While SSDs have higher cost per bit, SSDs are replacing HDDs
where speed, power consumption, small size, and durability are important.[10][11]

The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance. Capacity is specified in unit
prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1-terabyte (TB) drive has a capacity of
1,000 gigabytes (GB; where 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes). Typically, some of an HDD's capacity is
unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer operating system, and
possibly inbuilt redundancy for error correction and recovery. Performance is specified by the time
required to move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time) plus the time it takes for the
desired sector to move under the head (average latency, which is a function of the
physical rotational speed in revolutions per minute), and finally the speed at which the data is
transmitted (data rate).

The two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2.5-
inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard interface cables such
as PATA (Parallel ATA), SATA (Serial ATA), USB or SAS (Serial attached SCSI) cables.