IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi.[1][2] Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible for many of the innovations in these products and their technologies.[3] The basic mechanical arrangement of hard disk drives has not changed since the IBM 1301. Disk drive performance and characteristics are measured by the same standards now as they were in the 1950s. Few products in history have enjoyed such spectacular declines in cost and physical size along with equally dramatic improvements in capacity and performance.
IBM manufactured 8-inch floppy disk drives from 1969 until the mid-1980s, but did not become a significant manufacturer of smaller-sized, 5.25- or 3.5-inch floppy disk drives (the dimension refers to the diameter of the floppy disk, not the size of the drive).[4] IBM always offered its magnetic disk drives for sale but did not offer them with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) terms until 1981.[5] By 1996, IBM had stopped making hard disk drives unique to its systems and was offering all its HDDs as an OEM.[6][7]
IBM uses many terms to describe its various magnetic disk drives, such as direct-access storage device (DASD),[a] disk file and diskette file. Here, the current industry standard terms, hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD), are used.
^"Hitachi to Buy IBM's Hard Drive Business". PC Magazine. Ziff Davis, LLC. June 5, 2002. Retrieved March 8, 2014 – via Pcmag.com.
^"Hitachi Global – News Releases from Headquarters – Jan 6, 2003". Hitachi.com. Retrieved 2011-07-20.
^"Five decades of disk drive industry firsts". Archived from the original on July 26, 2011. Retrieved 2012-10-15.
^1986 Disk/Trend Report – Flexible Disk Drives shows IBM production only of 8-inch FDDs and states, IBM will end internal production of 8-inch drives by 1987.
^IBM Enters OEM Market For Winchester Disk Drives, Electronic News, September 14, 1981
^1996 Disk/Trend Report – Rigid Disk Drives, Specifications Section
^Francis, Bob (October 17, 1994). "IBM's disk drive family has three new members". InfoWorld. Vol. 16, no. 42. San Mateo, CA: IDG Inc. p. 40. Retrieved 2023-08-04.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).
and 21 Related for: History of IBM magnetic disk drives information
tape drives. The commercial usage of hard diskdrives (HDD) began in 1957, with the shipment of a production IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model...
component ofIBM products and both drives and disks were then sold separately starting in 1972 by Memorex and others. These disks and associated drives were...
off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box. Hard diskdrives were introduced by IBM in 1956, and were the dominant secondary...
two stable magnetic states, which are the +Ms and −Ms on the hysteresis loop. Examples of digital recording are floppy disks, hard diskdrives (HDDs), and...
The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard diskdrive (magneticdisk storage) for secondary storage. The system was...
as of 2017[update] Linear Tape-Open (LTO) supports continuous data transfer rates of up to 360 MB/s, a rate comparable to hard diskdrives. Magnetic-tape...
ofdisk failure is not limited only to drives, but also applies to other types ofmagnetic media. In the late 1990s, Iomega's 100-megabyte Zip disks used...
The IBM Storage product portfolio includes disk, flash, tape, NAS storage products, storage software and services. IBM's approach is to focus on data management...
announced a system using this drive as well, but later changed plans to use 3½-inch diskette drives instead. A magneticdisk in a hard plastic shell was...
"Rigid MagneticDiskDrive Specifications". 1997 DISK/TREND REPORT, RIGID DISKDRIVES. DISK/TREND, Inc. Reference Manual for IBM 3330 Series Disk Storage...
a disk by a disk driver. The earliest diskdrives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit...
computers are usually loaded from the disks as part of the boot process. Early computers predate diskdrives, floppy disks, or modern flash storage. Early storage...
manufactured hard diskdrives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several...
engineering, succeeding the decimal IBM 1620 in that market segment. Typical installations included a 1 megabyte diskdrive that stored the operating system...
for poising a magnetic head above a rapidly rotating magnetic drum." Flying heads became standard in drums and hard diskdrives. Magnetic drum units used...
megabyte-capacity hard disks were made available by Tandy and third parties. The Expansion Interface provided for up to four floppy drives and hard drives to be daisy-chained...
floppy disks (e.g., Imation SuperDisk), and other forms ofdrives with removable magnetic media, such as the Iomega Zip drive and Jaz drives, are now...
Global Information