Uploaded September 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
You may take computer storage for granted these days. Whether it’s a local solid-state drive or someone else’s HDD in the ‘Cloud’. There are a lot of them out there and their capacity has been increasing dramatically over the years. This is just a short video giving a quick look at the history of these devices and how little the principle of operation has changed. I realised, it’s just not possible to do this topic justice in one video as there are so many small a yet significant steps in the development of hard drives. There are many clever techniques been used over the years both in hardware and firmware to shrink the size and increase the storage, including magneto-resistive heads to translation tables in sectoring. While I have arranged the video as a history going back in time to very small storage sizes, it’s easy to forget that the cost for earlier drives put them way beyond home computing even in the 1980’s.
CONTENT:
00:00 - Intro
00:24 - SSD
00:45 - Inside HDD 2 1/2"
01:40 -Inside HDD 3 1/4"
02:35 - Inside HDD full-height 5 1/4"
03:20 - Interfaces
04:18 - Inside 8" Fujitsu drive
07:46 - Winchester drive platters
09:15 - 8" removable floppy disk
10:43 - 5 1/4" HDD spin-up
You may take computer storage for granted these days. Whether it’s a local solid-state drive or someone else’s HDD in the ‘Cloud’. There are a lot of them out there and their capacity has been increasing dramatically over the years. This is just a short video giving a quick look at the history of these devices and how little the principle of operation has changed. I realised, it’s just not possible to do this topic justice in one video as there are so many small a yet significant steps in the development of hard drives. There are many clever techniques been used over the years both in hardware and firmware to shrink the size and increase the storage, including magneto-resistive heads to translation tables in sectoring. While I have arranged the video as a history going back in time to very small storage sizes, it’s easy to forget that the cost for earlier drives put them way beyond home computing even in the 1980’s.
CONTENT:
00:00 - Intro
00:24 - SSD
00:45 - Inside HDD 2 1/2"
01:40 -Inside HDD 3 1/4"
02:35 - Inside HDD full-height 5 1/4"
03:20 - Interfaces
04:18 - Inside 8" Fujitsu drive
07:46 - Winchester drive platters
09:15 - 8" removable floppy disk
10:43 - 5 1/4" HDD spin-up
