Title: The Evolution of Hard Disk Drives Speakers: Neil Macphail Date: 17th February 2011 Time: 14.30 Room open in advance (from 14.00) – meet up with society members. Location: Fellows Library of the Science Museum Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2DD

About the talk

The Hard Disk drive has undergone an impressive evolution since the first drive became available in 1956. Indeed its rate of evolution exceeds that of the transistor as expressed in Moore's law. It also has made the journey from a specialised mainframe component to an almost commodity product. The aim of the talk is to convey to the audience the history and the scale of the technological advances that fuelled this rapid development.

The talk will address the following topics:

• What is a hard disk drive?
• Where does it fit in the computer storage hierarchy?
• What are its components and how does it work?
• The history of the hard disk drive from the first commercial product to the present day – including the growth in drive manufacture, the companies that made them and what became of them.
• The historical trends will be shown - on capacity, transfer rate, access time, size and cost
• What were the main technology innovations and what are the limiting factors now?. Are hard disk drives due for extinction or is their future assured?

About the speaker

Neil Macphail joined English Electric Leo Marconi in 1964 working on KDP10 mainframe development and retired from Fujitsu in 2002 after 38 years in Mainframe Input / Output Systems. During that time he managed the development of Disk, Tape and Communications products. He was a chartered member of the IEE and BIM. He is most strongly remembered for leading the 2900 CAFS hardware projects. As well as his involvement in disk drive controller development he was the ICL project liaison manger to Seagate Technology for Baracuda Disk Drives for several years.

Background

For a brief description of Disk Drives see the Wikipedia entry – click here to view.

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