My mechanical engineer dad used to work at R&D division of Maxtor (now acquired by Seagate) in Singapore during the 90s. He used to work on development of technologies to minimize the turbulence and vibration of the head caused by the spinning disks. Fluid mechanics was his specialization. He used to bring defective hard drives at home to show us, we used to play with them, lol. After the acquisition, he got laid off then started to teach at a university as a professor and used to use those defective hard drives as demos in his fluid mechanics classes. This video brought up those memories. Thanks. RIP dad.

Late 80's, a friend worked as a product manager for a hard disk company. He remarked one time, "Selling hard disks is a lot like selling fish. You only have so much time to move the product."

Correction: I was mistaken. The Winchester name did not come from the head actuator. I stand corrected. Should I delete the next paragraph? The Winchester name also comes from the head actuator action. Prior to the IBM 3340 the head actuators were based on voice coils to move the head in and out. A voice coil like a speaker uses. The Winchester actuator rotates the head assembly around a pivot point with a horizontal magnetic coil on the opposite end. This rotating action is similar to the lever action of a Winchester rifle. The Winchester action allowed the actuator assembly to be much more compact and had better head positioning precision. This is the head actuator design still used today. An interesting story is that my father Jack Harker was managing the Winchester project. At one point the project faced serious problems taking it from the lab to manufacturing. The problems were so severe Jack was considering pulling the plug on the project. At a meeting he made the offhand comment "If the team can make this work, I will walk on water." Needless to say, the problems were solved. IBM San Jose had reflecting pond with a tetrahedral sculpture that would twist in the wind. Jack had platforms built that were sunk a half inch under the water. With the launch of the 3340, there are pictures of him "walking on water" and kicking the surface of the water to make a spray. A nod to the hard work of the lab and manufacturing teams overcoming their obstacles. My father never mentioned the 30/30 naming story. He always said that the name came from the leaver action of the Winchester rifle.

Finally, after all those years now I know why HDD called Winchester. 🤯

My brother worked at Seagate, and would bring home defective drives that were just thrown into the trash. We'd play with the magnets and platters. This was before you could just buy neodymium magnets on the internet, so I had the coolest show&tells at school. Plus lots of blood blisters...

stayed in Mn next to the Seagate factory, it sits on the aptly named "Disk Drive".

Interesting video... I spent virtually my entire engineering career in the data storage biz... Started in the '70s when discs were big and brown, storing tens of megabytes... and finished a few years ago developing terabyte SSDs the size of a pack of gum. Worked at many of the big names and even a few of the startups lost along the way. The pace of development was always intense... and during the time the industry was transitioning its manufacturing offshore I spent a lot of time on 747s supporting Asian operations. Lots of highs and lows along the way... it was a heck of a ride... but happily out and retired... gone fishing.

I wouldn’t suggest that it is bust. For mass storage at reasonable prices it is still king.

I remember when Seagate introduced the first drive that automatically parked the hdd using the stored rotational energy in the platters to move the heads when it detected power loss.

I work at a semiconductor company that makes some of the magic that makes hard drives work. It has basically become a single source industry for some of the components (like the preamps) that sit on the read heads and basically turn noise into signals at massive rates. It is pure magic.

The HDD industry hasn't gone bust by any means. Industry leading companies continue to innovate, and their products are in high demand by data centers, etc. When mission-critical data must be stored with long-term reliability- it's stored on HDDs.

A practical 4 megabyte memory in 1956 really was a revolution. The computer "Colossus" built in the early 1940s by the UK's Post Office Research Station had a memory of a few hundred bits, implemented by thyratrons. These are a type of vacuum tube (called a valve in the UK; also the thyratron shouldn't really be called a vacuum tube because it has mercury vapour in it) that once signalled into conduction continues to conduct until the current is stopped by some external cause. Each of them needs about one watt to heat the cathode to keep the thyratron working. This means that 4 megabytes implemented by thyratrons would have 32 million of them and would consume tens of megawatts of electricity, the failure of which would cause the memory to forget everything that is in it. Now we take for granted that we can have hundreds of gigabytes of memory on something the size of our little finger nails and costing a few dollars.

Instead of a HDD, I spent my money on a SoundBlaster (TM), and was the first kid in the village to have proper PC sound. That really impressed all the other nerds around me (2 or 3).

Wow Mr Shugart could not stop winning. Founded a successful company which held on to his name so he needed to come up with a different name so he could start another even more successful company.

At a trade show in the early ‘80s I saw a large number of terminals connected to a base with a hard drive. I asked the spokesman “You mean all of these terminals are fighting to use this one hard drive?” He replied “We prefer to call it ‘sharing’.”

I'll never forget holding a 7500rpm IBM Deskstar drive in my hand while it was fully connected and spun-up. Something suddenly went wrong and the drive launched from my hand and flew 15 feet accross the room. I gained renewed respect for what was going on inside that shiny metal case!

Ah, the old days. I remember being green with envy at people who had hard drives. Not just for the storage but the speed; floppies were so disgustingly slow. Initial cost aside, I raise a glass to all the hard drive engineers.

Starting my data processing business, I made sure every computer I bought had TWO hard drives, I would read from one, write to the other as I ran my data through various steps. This really helped the throughput

1985: I wanted one of these sweet 5 MB drives so bad.

Learning HDD prices cost me my innocence. When I built my first computer at 10 I ended up learning a lot about international trade just to understand what was a good price for a HDD. It was my eye opening moment about class disparity between countries as well as a number of other things.