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IBM made the first hard drive in 1956. It was called the RAMAC 305. It was able to hold 5MB of data which is 5 million characters. It would cost $10,000 a MB to store data on the hard drive. The system was as big as two refrigerators.
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IBM comes up with the first removable hard drive, the 1311. It had 6 removable disks which could store 2MB each.
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IBM announces the 3340, the first modern "Winchester" hard drive.
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Seagate Technology is founded by Al Shurgart. The company is based on manufacturing hard drives.
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IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.
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Seagate releases the first 5.25-inch hard disk.
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Western Digital announces the first single-chip Winchester hard drive controller
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Western Digital makes the first Winchester hard drive controller card for the IBM PC/AT--and sets an industry standard
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Control Data, Compaq Computer, and Western Digital collaborate to develop the 40-pin IDE interface. IDE stands for Intelligent Drive Electronics, more commonly known as Integrated Drive Electronics
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The official SCSI spec is released; Apple Computer's Mac Plus is one of the first computers to use it. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols and electrical and optical interfaces.
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Western Digital buys the disk-drive assets of Tandon Corporation with an eye to manufacturing IDE drives
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Western Digital introduces its first 3.5-inch Caviar IDE hard drive.
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Seagate is first to market with a 7200-revolutions-per-minute hard drive, the 2.1GB Barracuda.
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Western Digital develops Enhanced IDE, an improved hard drive interface that breaks the 528MB-throughput barrier. EIDE also allows for attachment of optical and tape drives.
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IBM introduces the first drive using giant magneto resistive (GMR) heads, the 16.8GB Deskstar 16GP Titan, which stores 16.8GB on five 3.5-inch platters.
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Maxtor buys competitor Quantum's hard drive business. At the time, Quantum is the number-two drive maker, behind Seagate; this acquisition makes Maxtor the world's largest hard drive manufacturer.
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Seagate produces the first 15,000-rpm hard drive, the Cheetah X15.
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IBM sells its Data Storage Division to Hitachi, thus ending its involvement in developing and marketing disk drive technology.
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Western Digital introduces the first 10,000-rpm SATA hard drive, the 37GB Raptor, which is designed for the enterprise, but which gamers quickly learn is a hot desktop performer in dual-drive RAID setups
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Seagate's Momentus 5400.3 notebook hard drive is the first 2.5-inch model to use perpendicular magnetic recording, which boosts its capacity up to 160GB.
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First 750 GB hard drive. Becomes the largest hard drive to date.
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First 1 terabyte is introduced by Hitachi GST 1TB= 1000GB
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First 1.5TB hard drive is introduced by Seagate
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First 2TB hard drive is introduced by Western Digital.
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Firsth 3TB hard drvie is introduced by Seagate and Western Digital.
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First Hard Drive Manufactured by using the Advanced Format of 4,096 bytes a block ("4K") instead of 512 bytes a block
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First 4TB hard drive by Seagate.
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Seagate announces that it will ship hard disk drives with capacities up to 5 TB using shingled magnetic recording (SMR), a method where tracks are written to partially overlap each other. The read head, being smaller, can still read the overlapped tracks
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Seagate ships worlds first 8TB hard drive. That is 8 THOUSAND GIGABYTES!!!