Compared to modern disk drives, early hard disk drives were large, sensitive and cumbersome devices, more suited to use in the protected environment of a data center than in factories, offices or homes where they are found today. Disk media diameter was nominally 14 or 8 inches and were typically mounted in standalone boxes (resembling washing machines or even pizza ovens) or large equipment rack enclosures. Individual drives often required high-current ac power due to the large motors they required to turn the large disks. Hard disk drives were not commonly used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive.

The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. During the mid-1990s the typical hard disk drive for a PC had a capacity of about 1 GB. As of July 2010, desktop hard disk drives typically have a capacity of 500 to 1000 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity drives are 3 terabytes.

Contents

• 1 1950s - 1970s
• 2 1980s, the PC era
• 3 Timeline
• 4 Manufacturing history
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links