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Toshiba hard drives, the evolution of technology

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Toshiba hard drives, the evolution of technology

Toshiba hard drives, in 40 years HDD units have gone from 20 MB to the current 20 TB. A technological evolution told step by step by the company. The history of hard drives dates back to the 1950s, with drives using the same basic technology as today’s models. These are spinning magnetic disks that move arms with read/write heads that magnetize or scan bits. Resembling small cabinets and weighing nearly a ton, early HDDs were used in dedicated computers or mainframe systems. Solutions that have revolutionized data processing, making instant access to information possible.

Storage capacity grows

The success of hard drives began with the advent of PCs in the 1980s. At the time the units had a diameter 5.25 inches and held only a few megabytes. But no more space was needed, because the applications didn’t have graphical user interfaces and there was no need to store scanned documents, digital videos or other data. In the following years, storage capacity reached triple megabytes and interfaces were standardized.

Hard disk Toshiba

setup a nose

Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Manager, HDD Business Development di Toshiba Electronics Europe
The success of the new storage technology was demonstrated by the fact that in 1985, there were 75 hard drive manufacturers. Over the course of time, over 200 companies have tried to produce the drives, but only three are still active today. Consolidation began in the second half of the 1980s, production was economically viable only with large quantities.

Evolution of HDD technology

Starting in the late 80s, the 3.5-inch format became widespread and is still the reference standard today. Manufacturers have developed increasingly smaller formats, starting with 2.5-inch drives for notebooks, which today are only found in external USB drives. While SSD drives are more used in laptops. Made even smaller formats, now completely disappeared from the market. For example, 1.8-inch HDDs existed for PCMCIA slots in notebooks at the turn of the millennium.

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In the 2000s, MP3 players also came with HDDs, a model with a 1.0-inch format and 1 Gigabyte storage capacity. Since flash memory was expensive and memory cards had small capacities, 1-inch disks were also developed. They could be inserted into the CompactFlash slot of digital cameras. At the beginning of the 21st century, some smartphones installed HDDs barely larger than one inch, in some cases even 0.85 inch with 4GB. The size not further reduced, as flash memories have been preferred to HDDs in mobile devices.

Advantageous costs

Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Manager, HDD Business Development di Toshiba Electronics Europe
The emergence of flash memory meant that HDDs could only succeed because of their large capacities and cost-effectiveness. Perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), a new recording system, has led to a real quantum leap in capability. Until the mid-2000s, drives only held a few gigabytes, but soon after they exceeded 100GB and soon even 1TB became completely normal.

More storage capacity

Thanks to Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR), a new recording method has been developed in recent years. Based on microwaves, it can control and focus the magnetic flux on the writing head. This means that less is needed energy to magnetize the bits, so the recording head can be smaller and write data more densely. In 2021 Toshiba launched a hard drive with a new MAMR technology, called Flux-Controlled MAMR (FC-MAMR). Thanks to it has increased the storage capacity and improved energy efficiency.

The next stage of development

Building on the success, Toshiba has introduced the MG10 series, advanced HDDs with 10-bay helium-filled designs that increase capacity. It also allows you to store 20TB while maintaining the 3.5-inch format. In the next phase of development, Microwave-Assisted Switching MAMR (MAS-MAMR), microwaves will activate the coating of magnetic disks to further reduce power consumption and allow for further reduction in the size of the writing head.

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Storage architectures

Toshiba talks about the evolution of HDD technology

However, this will require a new coating for the discs, which manufacturers are working on. According to experts, MAS-MAMR technology will increase the capacity of 3.5-inch models up to 50TB in the coming years so hard drives will continue to bear the burden of data storage in the information age.

And in 2040?

Rainer W. Kaese, Senior Manager, HDD Business Development di Toshiba Electronics Europe
It seems unlikely that the next 40 years will see another leap in capacity like the one from 20MB to 20TB. If this were the case, in 2040 hard drives should therefore offer at least 20 Exabytes, ten times higher than that of a modern cloud data center. But those who owned a 20MB hard drive in the early 1980s probably never dreamed of the 20TB models.

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