hard drive

A hard disk drive (HDD, also formerly known as a fixed disk drive) is a digitally encoded non-volatile storage device which stores data on the magnetic surfaces of hard disk platters.

Hard disks were originally developed for use in connection with, or later inside, a single computer. Over time, applications for hard disk drives have expanded beyond computers to include video recorders, audio players, digital organizers, and digital cameras. In 2005 the first cellular telephones to include hard disk drives were introduced by Samsung and Nokia. The emergence of the need for large-scale, reliable storage, independent of a particular device, led to the introduction of configurations such as RAID, hardware such as network attached storage (NAS) devices, and systems such as storage area networks (SANs) for efficient access to large volumes of data.

The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. In the latter half of the 1990s, hard drives with capacities of 1 gigabyte and greater became available. As of 2006, the "smallest" desktop hard disk still in production has a capacity of 40 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity internal drives are a 3/4 terabyte (750 gigabytes), with external drives at or exceeding one terabyte by using multiple internal disks. These new internal drives increased their storage capacities with Perpendicular recording.

Technology

Hard drives record information by magnetizing a magnetic material in a pattern that represents the data. They read the data back by detecting the magnetization of the material. A typical hard disk drive design consists of a spindle which holds one or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data is recorded. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually glass or aluminum, and are coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Older drives used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current drives use a cobalt-based alloy.

The platters are spun at high speeds. Information is written to a platter as it rotates past mechanisms called read-and-write heads that fly very close over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetization of the material immediately under it. There is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm moves the heads on an arc (roughly radially) across the platters as they spin, allowing each head to access almost the entire surface of the platter as it spins.

The magnetic surface of each platter is divided into many small sub-micrometre-sized magnetic regions, each of which is used to encode a single binary unit of information. In today's hard drives each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred magnetic grains. Each magnetic region forms a magnetic dipole which generates a highly localised magnetic field nearby. The write head magnetizes a magnetic region by generating a strong local magnetic field nearby. Early hard drives used the same inductor that was used to read the data as an electromagnet to create this field. Later, metal in Gap (MIG) heads were used, and today thin film heads are common. With these later technologies, the read and write head are separate mechanisms, but are on the same actuator arm.

Hard drives have a mostly sealed enclosure that protects the drive internals from dust, condensation, and other sources of contamination. The hard disk's read-write heads fly on an air bearing which is a cushion of air only nanometers above the disk surface. The disk surface and the drive's internal environment must therefore be kept immaculate to prevent damage from fingerprints, hair, dust, smoke particles and such, given the sub-microscopic gap between the heads and disk.

Using rigid platters and sealing the unit allows much tighter tolerances than in a floppy disk. Consequently, hard disks can store much more data than floppy disk and access and transmit it faster. In 2006, a typical workstation hard disk might store between 80 GB and 750 GB of data, rotate at 7,200 to 10,000 revolutions per minute (RPM), and have a sequential media transfer rate of over 50 MB/s. The fastest workstation and server hard drives spin at 15,000 RPM, and can achieve sequential media transfer speeds up to and beyond 80 MB/s. Notebook hard drives, which are physically smaller than their desktop counterparts, tend to be slower and have less capacity. Most spin at only 4,200 RPM or 5,400 RPM, whereas the newest top models spin at 7,200 RPM.

History

Main article: history of hard disks

For many years, hard disks were large, cumbersome devices, more suited to use in the protected environment of a data center or large office than in a harsh industrial environment (due to their delicacy), or small office or home (due to their size and power consumption). Before the early 1980s, most hard disks had 8-inch (20 cm) or 14-inch (35 cm) platters, required an equipment rack or a large amount of floor space (especially the large removable-media drives, which were often referred to as "washing machines"), and in many cases needed high-amperage or even three-phase power hookups due to the large motors they used. Because of this, hard disks were not commonly used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard drive, with a capacity of 5 megabytes. In fact, in its factory configuration, the original IBM PC (IBM 5150) was not equipped with a hard drive.

Most microcomputer hard disk drives in the early 1980s were not sold under their manufacturer's names, but by OEMs as part of larger peripherals (such as the Corvus Disk System and the Apple ProFile). The IBM PC/XT had an internal hard disk, however, and this started a trend toward buying "bare" drives (often by mail order) and installing them directly into a system. Hard disk makers started marketing to end users as well as OEMs, and by the mid-1990s, hard disks had become available on retail store shelves.

While internal drives became the system of choice on PCs, external hard drives remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh and other platforms. Every Mac made between 1986 and 1998 has a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion easy; also, "toaster" Macs did not have easily accessible hard drive bays (or, in the case of the Mac Plus, any hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option. External SCSI drives were also popular with older microcomputers such as the Apple II series, and were also used extensively in Servers, a usage which is still popular today. The appearance in the late 1990s of high-speed external interfaces such as USB and FireWire has made external disk systems popular among regular users once again, especially for users who move large amounts of data between two or more locations, and most hard disk makers now make their disks available in external cases.

Hard disk characteristics

• Capacity, usually quoted in gigabytes.
• Physical size, usually quoted in inches:
  • Almost all hard disks today are of either the 3.5" or 2.5" varieties, used in desktops and laptops, respectively. 2.5" drives are usually slower and have less capacity but use less power and are more tolerant of movement. An increasingly common size is the 1.8" drives used in portable MP3 players and subnotebooks, which have very low power consumption and are highly shock-resistant. Additionally, there is the 1" form factor designed to fit the dimensions of CF Type II, which is also usually used as storage for portable devices including digital cameras. 1" was a de facto form factor led by IBM's Microdrive, but is now generically called 1" due to other manufacturers producing similar products. There is also a 0.85" form factor produced by Toshiba for use in mobile phones and similar applications. The size designations can be slightly confusing, for example a 3.5" disk drive has a case that is 4" wide. Furthermore, server-class hard disks also come in both 3.5" and 2.5" form factors.
• Reliability, usually given in terms of Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF):
  • SATA 1.0 drives support speeds up to 10,000 rpm and MTBF levels up to 1 million hours under an eight-hour, low-duty cycle. Fibre Channel (FC) drives support up to 15,000 rpm and an MTBF of 1.4 million hours under a 24-hour duty cycle.
• Number of I/O operations per second:
  • Modern disks can perform around 50 random access or 100 Sequential access operations per second.
• Power consumption (especially important in battery-powered laptops).
• audible noise in dBA (although many still report it in bels, not decibels).
• G-shock rating (surprisingly high in modern drives).
• Transfer Rate:
  • Inner Zone: from 44.2 MB/s to 74.5 MB/s.
  • Outer Zone: from 74.0 MB/s to 111.4 MB/s.
• Random access time: from 5 ms to 15 ms.

Capacity measurements

Hard drive manufacturers typically specify drive capacity using 'SI prefixes', that is, the SI definition of the prefixes "giga" and "mega." This is largely for historical reasons, since disk drive storage capacities exceeded millions of bytes ^[1] long before there were standard 'binary prefixes' (even before there were the SI prefixes, 1960). The IEC only standardized 'binary prefixes' in 1999. As it turned out, many practitioners early on in the computer and semiconductor industries adopted the term kilobyte to describe 2¹⁰ (1024) bytes because 1024 is "close enough" to the metric prefix kilo, which is defined as 10³ or 1000. Sometimes this non-SI conforming usage include a qualifier such as '"1 kB = 1,024 Bytes"' but this qualifier was frequently omitted, particularly in marketing literature. This trend became habit and continued to be applied to the prefixes "mega," "giga," "tera," and even "peta."

Operating systems and their utilities, particularly visual operating systems such Microsoft Windows, frequently report capacity using binary prefixes which results in a discrepancy between the drive manufacturer's stated capacity and the system's reported capacity. Obviously the difference becomes much more noticeable in reported capacities in the multiple gigabyte range, and users will often notice that the volume capacity reported by their OS is significantly less than that advertised by the hard drive manufacturer. For example, Microsoft's Windows 2000 reports drive capacity both in decimal to 12 or more significant digits and with binary prefixes to 3 significant digits. Thus a disk drive specified by a drive manufacturer as a '30 GB' drive has its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as '30,065,098,568 bytes' and '28.0 GB'. The drive manufacturer has used the SI definition of "giga," 10⁹ and can be considered as an approximation of a gibibyte. Since utilities provided by the operating system probably define a gigabyte as 2³⁰, or 1073741824, bytes, the reported capacity of the drive will be closer to 28.0 GB, a difference of approximately 7%. For this very reason, many utilities that report capacity have begun to use the aforementioned IEC standard binary prefixes (e.g. KiB, MiB, GiB) since their definitions are unambiguous.

Many people mistakenly attribute the discrepancy in reported and specified capacities to reserved space used for file system and partition accounting information. However, for large (several GiB) filesystems, this data rarely occupies more than a few MiB, and therefore cannot possibly account for the apparent "loss" of tens of GBs.

The capacity of a hard drive can actually manually be calculated. Given the number of cylinders, sectors, and heads, the hard drive's capacity is Cylinders × Heads × Sectors × 512 bytes per sector.

Integrity

The hard disk's spindle system relies on air pressure inside the drive to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk is in motion. A hard disk drive requires a certain range of air pressures in order to operate properly. The connection to the external environment and pressure occur through a small hole in the enclosure (about 1/2 mm in diameter), usually with a carbon filter on the inside (the breather filter, see below). If the air pressure is too low, there will not be enough lift for the flying head, the head will not be at the proper height, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss. Specially manufactured sealed and pressurized drives are needed for reliable high-altitude operation, above about 10,000 feet (3,000 m). This does not apply to pressurized enclosures, like an airplane pressurized cabin. Modern drives include temperature sensors and adjust their operation to the operating environment.

Very high humidity for extended periods can cause accelerated wear of the drive's heads and disks by corrosion. If the drive uses "Contact Start/Stop" (CSS) technology to park its heads on the disk when not operating, increased humidity can also lead to increased stiction (the tendency for the heads to stick to the disk surface). This can cause physical damage to the disk and spindle motor and can also lead to head crash. Breather holes can be seen on all drives — they usually have a warning sticker next to them, informing the user not to cover the holes. The air inside the operating drive is constantly moving too, being swept in motion by friction with the spinning disk platters. This air passes through an internal recirculation (or "recirc") filter to remove any leftover contaminants from manufacture, any particles or chemicals that may have somehow entered the drive, and any particles or outgassing generated internally in normal operation.

Due to the extremely close spacing between the heads and the disk surface, any contamination of the read-write heads or disk platters can lead to a head crash — a failure of the disk in which the head scrapes across the platter surface, often grinding away the thin magnetic film. For giant magnetoresistive (GMR) heads in particular, a minor head crash from contamination (that does not remove the magnetic surface of the disk) will still result in the head temporarily overheating, due to friction with the disk surface, and can render the data unreadable for a short period until the head temperature stabilizes (so called "thermal asperity," a problem which can partially be dealt with by proper electronic filtering of the read signal). Head crashes can be caused by electronic failure, a sudden power failure, physical shock, wear and tear, corrosion, or poorly manufactured disks and heads. In most desktop and server drives, when powering down, the heads are moved to a landing zone, an area of the disk usually near its inner diameter (ID), where no data is stored. This area is called the CSS (Contact Start/Stop) zone. However, especially in old models, sudden power interruptions or a power supply failure can sometimes result in the drive shutting down with the heads in the data zone, which increases the risk of data loss. In fact, it used to be procedure to "park" the hard drive before shutting down your computer. Newer drives are designed such that either a spring (at first) and then rotational inertia in the platters is used to safely park the heads in the case of unexpected power loss.

The hard disk's electronics control the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk, and perform reads and writes on demand from the disk controller. Modern drive firmware is capable of scheduling reads and writes efficiently on the disk surfaces and remapping sectors of the disk which have failed. Also, most major hard drive and motherboard vendors now support self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology (S.M.A.R.T.), by which impending failures can be predicted, allowing the user to be alerted to prevent data loss.

Landing zones

Around 1995 IBM pioneered a technology where the landing zone is made by a precision laser process (Laser Zone Texture = LZT) producing an array of smooth nanometer-scale "bumps" in the ID landing zone, thus vastly improving stiction and wear performance. This technology is still widely in use today (2006). A few years after LZT, initially for mobile applications (i.e. laptop etc.), and later also for the other HDD types, IBM introduced "head unloading" technology, where the heads are lifted off the platters onto plastic "ramps" near the outer disk edge, thus eliminating the risk of stiction altogether and greatly improving non-operating shock performance. All HDD manufacturers use these two technologies to this day. Both have a list of advantages and drawbacks in terms of loss of storage space, relative difficulty of mechanical tolerance control, cost of implementation, etc.

IBM created a technology for their Thinkpad line of laptop computers called the Active Protection System. When a sudden, sharp movement is detected by the built-in motion sensor in the Thinkpad, internal hard disk heads automatically unload themselves into the parking zone to reduce the risk of any potential data loss or scratches made. Apple later also utilized this technology in their Powerbook, iBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook line, known as the Sudden Motion Sensor.

Spring tension from the head mounting constantly pushes the heads towards the disk. While the disk is spinning, the heads are supported by an air bearing and experience no physical contact or wear. In CSS drives the sliders carrying the head sensors (often also just called heads) are designed to reliably survive a number of landings and takeoffs from the disk surface, though wear and tear on these microscopic components eventually takes its toll. Most manufacturers design the sliders to survive 50,000 contact cycles before the chance of damage on startup rises above 50%. However, the decay rate is not linear—when a drive is younger and has fewer start-stop cycles, it has a better chance of surviving the next startup than an older, higher-mileage drive (as the head literally drags along the drive's surface until the air bearing is established). For example, the Maxtor DiamondMax series of desktop hard drives are rated to 50,000 start-stop cycles. This means that no failures attributed to the head-disk interface were seen before at least 50,000 start-stop cycles during testing.

Access and interfaces

Hard disks are generally accessed over one of a number of bus types, including ATA (IDE, EIDE), Serial ATA (SATA), SCSI, SAS, IEEE 1394, USB, and Fibre Channel.

Back in the days of the ST-506 interface, the data encoding scheme was also important. The first ST-506 disks used Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding (which is still used on the common "1.44 MB" (1440 KiB) 3.5-inch floppy), and transferred data at a rate of 5 megabits per second. Later on, controllers using 2,7 RLL (or just "RLL") encoding increased the transfer rate by half, to 7.5 megabits per second; it also increased drive capacity by half.

Many ST-506 interface drives were only certified by the manufacturer to run at the lower MFM data rate, while other models (usually more expensive versions of the same basic drive) were certified to run at the higher RLL data rate. In some cases, the drive was overengineered just enough to allow the MFM-certified model to run at the faster data rate; however, this was often unreliable and was not recommended. (An RLL-certified drive could run on a MFM controller, but with 1/3 less data capacity and speed.)

Enhanced Small Disk Interface (ESDI) also supported multiple data rates (ESDI drives always used 2,7 RLL, but at 10, 15 or 20 megabits per second), but this was usually negotiated automatically by the drive and controller; most of the time, however, 15 or 20 megabit ESDI drives weren't downward compatible (i.e. a 15 or 20 megabit drive wouldn't run on a 10 megabit controller). ESDI drives typically also had jumpers to set the number of sectors per track and (in some cases) sector size.

SCSI originally had just one speed, 5 MHz (for a maximum data rate of 5 megabytes per second), but later this was increased dramatically. The SCSI bus speed had no bearing on the drive's internal speed because of buffering between the SCSI bus and the drive's internal data bus; however, many early drives had very small buffers, and thus had to be reformatted to a different interleave (just like ST-506 drives) when used on slow computers, such as early IBM PC compatibles and Apple Macintoshes.

ATA drives have typically had no problems with interleave or data rate, due to their controller design, but many early models were incompatible with each other and couldn't run in a master/slave setup (two drives on the same cable). This was mostly remedied by the mid-1990s, when ATA's specification was standardised and the details began to be cleaned up, but still causes problems occasionally (especially with CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives, and when mixing Ultra DMA and non-UDMA devices).

Serial ATA does away with master/slave setups entirely, placing each drive on its own channel (with its own set of I/O ports) instead.

FireWire/IEEE 1394 and USB(1.0/2.0) hard disks are external units containing generally ATA or SCSI drives with ports on the back allowing very simple and effective expansion and mobility. Most FireWire/IEEE 1394 models are able to daisy-chain in order to continue adding peripherals without requiring additional ports on the computer itself.

Drive families used in personal computers

Notable drive families include:

• MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation) drives required that the controller electronics be compatible with the drive electronics.
• RLL (Run Length Limited) drives were named after the modulation technique that made them an improvement on MFM. They required large cables between the controller in the PC and the hard drive, the drive did not have a controller, only a modulator/demodulator.

• ESDI (Enhanced Small Disk Interface) was an interface developed by Maxtor to allow faster communication between the PC and the disk than MFM or RLL.

• Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) was later renamed to ATA, and then PATA.

The name comes from the way early families had the hard drive controller external to the drive. Moving the hard disk controller from the interface card to the drive helped to standardize interfaces, reducing cost and complexity.

The data cable was originally 40 conductor, but UDMA modes from the later drives requires using an 80 conductor cable (note that the 80 conductor cable still uses a 40 position connector.)

The interface changed from 40 pins to 39 pin. The missing pin acts as a key to prevent incorrect insertion of the connector, a common cause of drive and controller damage.

• SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) was an early competitor with ESDI, originally named SASI for Shugart Associates. SCSI drives were standard on servers, workstations, and Apple Macintosh computers through the mid-90s, by which time most models had been transitioned to IDE (and later, SATA) family drives. Only in 2005 did the capacity of SCSI drives fall behind IDE drive technology, though the highest-performance drives are still available in SCSI and Fibre Channel only. The length limitations of the data cable allows for external SCSI devices. Originally SCSI data cables used single ended data transmission, but server class SCSI could use differential transmission, and then Fibre Channel (FC) interface, and then more specifically the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL), connected SCSI hard drives using fibre optics. FC-AL is the cornerstone of storage area networks, although other protocols like iSCSI and ATA over Ethernet have been developed as well.

• SATA (Serial ATA). The SATA data cable has only one data pair for the differential transmission of data to the device, and one pair for receiving from the device. That requires that data be transmitted serially. The same differential transmission system is used in RS485, Appletalk,USB, Firewire,and differential SCSI. In 2005/2006 parlance, the 40 pin IDE/ATA is called "PATA" or parallel ATA, which means that there are 16 bits of data transferred in parallel at a time on the data cable.

• SAS (Serial Attached SCSI). The SAS is a new generation serial communication protocol for devices designed to allow for much higher speed data transfers and is compatible with SATA. SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices but still uses SCSI commands for interacting with SAS

• EIDE was an unofficial update (by Western Digital) to the original IDE standard, with the key improvement being the use of DMA to transfer data between the drive and the computer, an improvement later adopted by the official ATA standards. DMA is used to transfer data without the CPU or program being responsible to transfer every word. That leaves the CPU/program/operating system to do other tasks while the data transfer occurs.

Manufacturers

Most of the world's hard disks are now manufactured by just a handful of large firms: Seagate, Maxtor (acquired by Seagate in 2006), Western Digital, Samsung, and Hitachi which owns the former drive manufacturing division of IBM. Fujitsu continues to make mobile- and server-class drives but exited the desktop-class market in 2001. Toshiba is a major manufacturer of 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch notebook drives.

Dozens of former hard drive manufacturers have gone out of business, merged, or closed their hard drive divisions; as capacities and demand for products increased, profits became hard to find, and there were shakeouts in the late 1980s and late 1990s. The first notable casualty of the business in the PC era was Computer Memories Inc. or CMI; after an incident with faulty 20 MB AT drives in 1985.^[2], CMI's reputation never recovered, and they exited the hard drive business in 1987. Another notable failure was MiniScribe, who went bankrupt in 1990 after it was found that they had "cooked the books" and inflated sales numbers for several years. Many other smaller companies (like Kalok, Microscience, LaPine, Areal, Priam and PrairieTek) also did not survive the shakeout, and had disappeared by 1993; Micropolis was able to hold on until 1997, and JTS, a relative latecomer to the scene, lasted only a few years and was gone by 1999, after attempting to manufacture hard drives in India using a second hand factory.^{citation needed]} Rodime was also an important manufacturer during the 1980s, but stopped making drives in the early 1990s amid the shakeout and now concentrates on technology licensing; they hold a number of patents related to 3.5-inch form factor hard drives.

• 1988: Tandon sold its disk manufacturing division to Western Digital (WDC), which was then a well-known controller designer.
• 1989: Seagate Technology bought Control Data's high-end disk business, as part of CDC's exit from hardware manufacturing.
• 1990: Maxtor buys MiniScribe out of bankruptcy, making it the core of its low-end drive division.
• 1994: Quantum bought DEC's storage division, giving it a high-end drive range to go with its more consumer-oriented ProDrive range, as well as the DLT tape drive range.
• 1995, Conner Peripherals, which was founded by one of Seagate Technology's cofounders along with personnel from MiniScribe, announces a merger with Seagate, which was completed in early 1996.
• 1996: JTS merges with Atari, allowing JTS to bring its drive range into production. Atari was sold to Hasbro in 1998, while JTS itself went bankrupt in 1999.
• 2000: Quantum sells its disk division to Maxtor to concentrate on tape drives and backup equipment.
• 2003: Following the controversy over mass failures of its Deskstar 75GXP range, hard disk pioneer IBM sold the majority of its disk division to Hitachi, who renamed it Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST).
• 2005: Seagate and Maxtor announce their intent to merge. US DoJ approval was given for Maxtor to be acquired by Seagate for US$1.9 billion^[3], and the merger closed in mid-2006.

See also

• Early IBM disk storage
• File system
• Hybrid drive
• Kryder's law
• PRML
• RK05
• Superparamagnetic effect

References

External links

• The Hard Disk That Changed The World
• TechEncyclopedia about Hard Disks
• Hard disk interfaces pinouts
• Technical Whitepaper (non marketing): Comprehensive Overview of Modern Recording Techniques and Hard Disk Drive Technologies
• Behold the God Box - Less's Law and future implications of massive cheap hard disk storage
• How Hard Disks Work
• Digest 2005 - State of the art hard disk drives in 2005
• 12.8 petabyte cubic cm hard drive
• War of the Disks: Hard Disk Drives vs. Flash Solid State Disks Despatches from the magneto / flash wars
• Drive Service Company's Top and Bottom list of Hard Drives - from the perspective of a dead hard drive recovery company