Thoroughly Modern Hard Drives

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

March 8, 2004

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IT computing used to drive advances in hard drives, but today, consumer electronics are driving the demand for smaller, faster, and higher-capacity hard drives.

According to In-Stat/MDR industry analyst Cindy Wolf, consumer electronics with integrated hard drives will have 7 percent of the total hard drive market in 2003. That's nearly double the 2002 rate. From 2002 to 2007, she expects the market to grow from 2002's 9.3 million units at a compound annual growth rate of 56.7 percent.

Today, that means more consumer electronics devices like TiVo personal video recorders (PVRs), and portable digital audio players such as Apple's iPod. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Chief Technologist John Best believes that by 2007, hard drives will be embedded throughout our lives in such places as car entertainment centers.

The chief market, according to Wolf, is home entertainment. But she also thinks that camcorders, cameras, and PDAs will push hard drives from PCs to handheld devices. However, Jim Porter, president of the DISK/TREND drive analysis company, believes that the biggest market to date has been for games, followed by television appliances.

Simultaneously, hard drive vendors are running into the limits of just much data they can read and write on a square inch of disk space: its areal density. While hard drive capacity will increase, it will probably not continue to double every year. Hard drive prices per GB of storage capacity have continued to fall as overall disk capacity has increased, thereby reducing profit margins.

How Hard Drives Work

The first production hard disk was the IBM 305 Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC), which made its appearance on September 13, 1956. Seventeen years later, IBM introduced the model 3340 disk drive. With the first sealed internal environment and improved "air bearing," it became the father of today's hard drives. Since it had two separate 30 MB spindles, it was sometimes called the "30-30," which led to its most popular nickname: It was called the "Winchester" disk drive, after the famous 30-30 Winchester rifle.

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