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96-474: For hard disk drive booting the Open Firmware implementation called SmartFirmware requires an RDB boot partition that contains either an affs1 or ext2 partition. Note that any changes to the ext2 on-disc format may prevent booting. It is, however, possible to add some ext3 features so long as the volume can still be recognized as ext2 . There are two versions of the system: The Pegasos I and

192-684: A spindle that holds flat circular disks, called platters , which hold the recorded data. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy , glass , or ceramic . They are coated with a shallow layer of magnetic material typically 10–20 nm in depth, with an outer layer of carbon for protection. For reference, a standard piece of copy paper is 0.07–0.18 mm (70,000–180,000 nm) thick. The platters in contemporary HDDs are spun at speeds varying from 4200  rpm in energy-efficient portable devices, to 15,000 rpm for high-performance servers. The first HDDs spun at 1,200 rpm and, for many years, 3,600 rpm

288-512: A Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) encoding and was later released in a 10 MB version, the ST-412 . With this, Seagate secured a contract as a major OEM supplier for the IBM XT , IBM 's first personal computer to contain a hard disk. The large volumes of units sold to IBM fueled Seagate's early growth. In their first year, Seagate shipped $ 10 million worth of units to consumers. By 1983,

384-672: A limited liability company (LLC) named Seagate Technology LLC and operates to this day as such. Both the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Harvard Business School have written multiple case studies on the Seagate buyout and turnaround. In addition, several leading management books cite the Seagate turnaround. Luczo became the chairman of the board of directors of Seagate Technology on June 19, 2002. In 2003, he accepted an invitation from

480-522: A stepper motor . Early hard disk drives wrote data at some constant bits per second, resulting in all tracks having the same amount of data per track, but modern drives (since the 1990s) use zone bit recording , increasing the write speed from inner to outer zone and thereby storing more data per track in the outer zones. In modern drives, the small size of the magnetic regions creates the danger that their magnetic state might be lost because of thermal effects ⁠ ⁠— thermally induced magnetic instability which

576-486: A stock buyback plan. In 2010, Seagate announced that it was moving its headquarters and most of its staff from Scotts Valley to Cupertino, California. In June 2010, Seagate released the world's first 3 TB hard drive. That September, Seagate released the first portable 1.5 TB hard drive. In July 2011, the company changed its country of incorporation from the Cayman Islands to Ireland. Since then,

672-416: A "stopgap" technology between PMR and Seagate's intended successor heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). SMR utilises overlapping tracks for increased data density, at the cost of design complexity and lower data access speeds (particularly write speeds and random access 4k speeds). By contrast, HGST (now part of Western Digital ) focused on developing ways to seal helium -filled drives instead of

768-582: A Field Generation Layer (FGL) and a Spin Injection Layer (SIL), and the FGL produces a magnetic field using spin-polarised electrons originating in the SIL, which is a form of spin torque energy. A typical HDD has two electric motors: a spindle motor that spins the disks and an actuator (motor) that positions the read/write head assembly across the spinning disks. The disk motor has an external rotor attached to

864-418: A bit cell comprising about 18 magnetic grains (11 by 1.6 grains). Since the mid-2000s, areal density progress has been challenged by a superparamagnetic trilemma involving grain size, grain magnetic strength and ability of the head to write. In order to maintain acceptable signal-to-noise, smaller grains are required; smaller grains may self-reverse ( electrothermal instability ) unless their magnetic strength

960-489: A breather port, unlike their air-filled counterparts. Other recording technologies are either under research or have been commercially implemented to increase areal density, including Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). HAMR requires a different architecture with redesigned media and read/write heads, new lasers, and new near-field optical transducers. HAMR is expected to ship commercially in late 2024, after technical issues delayed its introduction by more than

1056-511: A coming economic boom in the disk drive market. The name was changed to Seagate Technology to avoid a lawsuit from Xerox's subsidiary Shugart Associates (also founded by Shugart). The company's first product, the ST-506 , with a storage capacity of 5 megabytes (MB), was released in 1980. It was the first hard disk to fit the 5.25-inch form factor of the Shugart mini-floppy drive. It used

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1152-449: A component of the IBM 305 RAMAC system. It was approximately the size of two large refrigerators and stored five million six-bit characters (3.75 megabytes ) on a stack of 52 disks (100 surfaces used). The 350 had a single arm with two read/write heads, one facing up and the other down, that moved both horizontally between a pair of adjacent platters and vertically from one pair of platters to

1248-443: A corresponding developer community. The community is a group of open-source researchers and developers working to advance mass-capacity object storage. CORTX open-source software is hosted for download and collaboration on GitHub . As of May 18, 2021, the new Irish public limited company Seagate Technology Holdings plc became the publicly traded parent company of Seagate, replacing "Seagate Technology plc." In November 2021, at

1344-1087: A decade, from earlier projections as early as 2009. HAMR's planned successor, bit-patterned recording (BPR), has been removed from the roadmaps of Western Digital and Seagate. Western Digital's microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), also referred to as energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR), was sampled in 2020, with the first EAMR drive, the Ultrastar HC550, shipping in late 2020. Two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) and "current perpendicular to plane" giant magnetoresistance (CPP/GMR) heads have appeared in research papers. Some drives have adopted dual independent actuator arms to increase read/write speeds and compete with SSDs. A 3D-actuated vacuum drive (3DHD) concept and 3D magnetic recording have been proposed. Depending upon assumptions on feasibility and timing of these technologies, Seagate forecasts that areal density will grow 20% per year during 2020–2034. The highest-capacity HDDs shipping commercially in 2024 are 32 TB. The capacity of

1440-411: A hard disk drive, as reported by an operating system to the end user, is smaller than the amount stated by the manufacturer for several reasons, e.g. the operating system using some space, use of some space for data redundancy, space use for file system structures. Confusion of decimal prefixes and binary prefixes can also lead to errors. Seagate Technology Seagate Technology Holdings plc

1536-472: A meeting between Seagate executives and representatives of Silver Lake Partners. On November 22, 2000, Seagate management, Veritas Software, and an investor group led by Silver Lake closed a complex deal that privatized Seagate. At the time, this was the largest buyout ever of a technology company. The total deal, worth about $ 20 billion, included the sale of its disk-drive operations for $ 2 billion to an investor group led by Silver Lake Partners . The goal of

1632-422: A moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage , retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box . Hard disk drives were introduced by IBM in 1956, and were

1728-614: A new glass-ceramic compound to manufacture disk substrates. In 1991, Seagate also introduced the Barracuda HDD, the industry's first hard disk with a 7,200 RPM spindle speed. In May 1993, Seagate became the first company to cumulatively ship 50 million HDDs over its firm's history. The following year, Seagate Technology Inc moved from the Nasdaq stock exchange to the New York Stock Exchange , trading under

1824-475: A removable disk module, which included both the disk pack and the head assembly, leaving the actuator motor in the drive upon removal. Later "Winchester" drives abandoned the removable media concept and returned to non-removable platters. In 1974, IBM introduced the swinging arm actuator, made feasible because the Winchester recording heads function well when skewed to the recorded tracks. The simple design of

1920-485: A restructuring plan to reduce headcount by 8%, equivalent to approximately 3,000 jobs. On January 17, 2024, Seagate announced the release of the first 30 TB HDD with the Exos Mozaic 3+ HDD series. The series utilizes Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology with an areal density of 3 TB per platter. The 30 TB Mozaic 3+ drive uses ten platters, only one more than

2016-538: A second set. Variants of the IBM 350 were the IBM 355 , IBM 7300 and IBM 1405 . In 1961, IBM announced, and in 1962 shipped, the IBM ;1301 disk storage unit, which superseded the IBM 350 and similar drives. The 1301 consisted of one (for Model 1) or two (for model 2) modules, each containing 25 platters, each platter about 1 ⁄ 8 -inch (3.2 mm) thick and 24 inches (610 mm) in diameter. While

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2112-560: A software company based in Boston, Massachusetts . This company developed the LAN monitoring software kit The Frye Utilities for Networks , which won PC Magazine 's "Editor's Choice" award in 1995. In 1996, Seagate introduced the industry's first hard disk with a 10,000 RPM spindle speed, the Cheetah 4LP. By 2000, this product increased to a speed of 15,000 RPM with the release of

2208-616: A swing arm drive, the IBM 0680 (Piccolo), with eight inch platters, exploring the possibility that smaller platters might offer advantages. Other eight inch drives followed, then 5 + 1 ⁄ 4  in (130 mm) drives, sized to replace the contemporary floppy disk drives . The latter were primarily intended for the then fledgling personal computer (PC) market. Over time, as recording densities were greatly increased, further reductions in disk diameter to 3.5" and 2.5" were found to be optimum. Powerful rare earth magnet materials became affordable during this period, and were complementary to

2304-423: A thin film of ferromagnetic material on both sides of a disk. Sequential changes in the direction of magnetization represent binary data bits . The data is read from the disk by detecting the transitions in magnetization. User data is encoded using an encoding scheme, such as run-length limited encoding, which determines how the data is represented by the magnetic transitions. A typical HDD design consists of

2400-499: A tiny fraction of the detected errors end up as not correctable. Examples of specified uncorrected bit read error rates include: Within a given manufacturers model the uncorrected bit error rate is typically the same regardless of capacity of the drive. The worst type of errors are silent data corruptions which are errors undetected by the disk firmware or the host operating system; some of these errors may be caused by hard disk drive malfunctions while others originate elsewhere in

2496-704: Is a standardized version of the Pegasos II. It was the first open source based PowerPC computer and gave PowerPC a host/target development environment. Genesi has released the complete specifications (design and component listing) free of charge. The ODW-derived Home Media Center won the Best in Show award at the Freescale Technology Forum in 2005, have an ATI certification, and a "Ready for IBM Technology" certification. Several operating systems run on

2592-531: Is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin , Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California , United States. Seagate developed the first 5.25-inch hard disk drive (HDD), the 5-megabyte ST-506 , in 1980. They were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during

2688-446: Is capable of scheduling reads and writes efficiently on the platter surfaces and remapping sectors of the media that have failed. Modern drives make extensive use of error correction codes (ECCs), particularly Reed–Solomon error correction . These techniques store extra bits, determined by mathematical formulas, for each block of data; the extra bits allow many errors to be corrected invisibly. The extra bits themselves take up space on

2784-590: Is commonly known as the " superparamagnetic limit ". To counter this, the platters are coated with two parallel magnetic layers, separated by a three-atom layer of the non-magnetic element ruthenium , and the two layers are magnetized in opposite orientation, thus reinforcing each other. Another technology used to overcome thermal effects to allow greater recording densities is perpendicular recording (PMR), first shipped in 2005, and as of 2007 , used in certain HDDs. Perpendicular recording may be accompanied by changes in

2880-669: Is improving faster than HDDs. NAND has a higher price elasticity of demand than HDDs, and this drives market growth. During the late 2000s and 2010s, the product life cycle of HDDs entered a mature phase, and slowing sales may indicate the onset of the declining phase. The 2011 Thailand floods damaged the manufacturing plants and impacted hard disk drive cost adversely between 2011 and 2013. In 2019, Western Digital closed its last Malaysian HDD factory due to decreasing demand, to focus on SSD production. All three remaining HDD manufacturers have had decreasing demand for their HDDs since 2014. A modern HDD records data by magnetizing

2976-418: Is increased, but known write head materials are unable to generate a strong enough magnetic field sufficient to write the medium in the increasingly smaller space taken by grains. Magnetic storage technologies are being developed to address this trilemma, and compete with flash memory –based solid-state drives (SSDs). In 2013, Seagate introduced shingled magnetic recording (SMR), intended as something of

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3072-532: Is riding the world's gadget boom. Its 1-inch drives are the archives for cameras and MP3 players." It also credited Seagate as being the company that "sparked the personal computer revolution 25 years ago with the first 5.25-inch hard drive for the PC". In April 2006, Seagate announced the first professional Direct-To-Disc digital cinema professional video camera aimed at the independent filmmaking market. This technology used Seagate's HDDs. In 2007, Seagate created

3168-460: Is shaped rather like an arrowhead and is made of doubly coated copper magnet wire . The inner layer is insulation, and the outer is thermoplastic, which bonds the coil together after it is wound on a form, making it self-supporting. The portions of the coil along the two sides of the arrowhead (which point to the center of the actuator bearing) then interact with the magnetic field of the fixed magnet. Current flowing radially outward along one side of

3264-588: Is specified in unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000: a 1- terabyte (TB) drive has a capacity of 1,000 gigabytes , where 1 gigabyte = 1 000 megabytes = 1 000 000 kilobytes (1 million) = 1 000 000 000 bytes (1 billion). Typically, some of an HDD's capacity is unavailable to the user because it is used by the file system and the computer operating system , and possibly inbuilt redundancy for error correction and recovery. There can be confusion regarding storage capacity, since capacities are stated in decimal gigabytes (powers of 1000) by HDD manufacturers, whereas

3360-645: The Apple Macintosh . Many Macintosh computers made between 1986 and 1998 featured a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion simple. Older compact Macintosh computers did not have user-accessible hard drive bays (indeed, the Macintosh 128K , Macintosh 512K , and Macintosh Plus did not feature a hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option for expanding upon any internal storage. HDD improvements have been driven by increasing areal density , listed in

3456-738: The Open Compute Summit , Seagate demonstrated the industry's first HDD with a non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface. This was unusual because HDDs operate far below the capabilities of the NVMe interface, which is usually associated with faster storage media like SSDs. In May 2022, Seagate presented and demonstrated their LiDAR system at the Autosens conference in Detroit. In February 2023, it divested its LiDAR division to Luminar Technologies . In October 2022, Seagate announced

3552-572: The Shannon limit and thus provide the highest storage density available. Typical hard disk drives attempt to "remap" the data in a physical sector that is failing to a spare physical sector provided by the drive's "spare sector pool" (also called "reserve pool"), while relying on the ECC to recover stored data while the number of errors in a bad sector is still low enough. The S.M.A.R.T ( Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology ) feature counts

3648-401: The hybrid drive concept. In 2007, Seagate announced the "phase out" of parallel ATA hard disk drives by early 2008. In April 2008, Seagate was the first to ship one billion HDDs. According to CNET , it took 17 years to ship the first 100 million and 15 years to ship the next 900 million. In 2009, Bill Watkins was released from employment as CEO. In January 2009, Luczo was asked by

3744-423: The 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Much of their growth has come through their acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporation 's Imprimis division, the makers of CDC's HDD products. Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsung 's HDD business in 2011. Today, Seagate, along with its competitor Western Digital , dominates

3840-565: The Cheetah 15X. In May 1997, the High Court of Justice in England awarded Amstrad PLC $ 93 million in a lawsuit over reportedly faulty disk drives Seagate sold to Amstrad, a British manufacturer and marketer of personal computers. That year, Seagate also introduced the first Fibre Channel interface hard drive. In 1997, Seagate experienced a downturn, along with the rest of the industry. In July 1998, Shugart resigned his positions with

3936-573: The Freescale MPC7447 chip with a small fan. Passive cooling solutions are possible and sold with the "Home Media and Communication System", which is based on Pegasos II G4. Genesi discontinued production of the Pegasos II in 2006, as the result of new European Union legislation requiring the use of more expensive and lead-free solder under the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS). The Open Desktop Workstation, or ODW ,

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4032-503: The HDD market. Seagate Technology (then called Shugart Technology ) was incorporated on November 1, 1978, and commenced operations with co-founders Al Shugart , Tom Mitchell, Doug Mahon, Finis Conner, and Syed Iftikar in October 1979. The company came into being when Conner approached Shugart with the idea of starting a new company to develop 5.25-inch HDDs which Conner predicted would be

4128-477: The HDD, but allow higher recording densities to be employed without causing uncorrectable errors, resulting in much larger storage capacity. For example, a typical 1  TB hard disk with 512-byte sectors provides additional capacity of about 93  GB for the ECC data. In the newest drives, as of 2009 , low-density parity-check codes (LDPC) were supplanting Reed–Solomon; LDPC codes enable performance close to

4224-481: The IBM GV (Gulliver) drive, invented at IBM's UK Hursley Labs, became IBM's most licensed electro-mechanical invention of all time, the actuator and filtration system being adopted in the 1980s eventually for all HDDs, and still universal nearly 40 years and 10 billion arms later. Like the first removable pack drive, the first "Winchester" drives used platters 14 inches (360 mm) in diameter. In 1978, IBM introduced

4320-558: The New York Stock Exchange to join its Listed Companies Advisory Committee. In 2003, Seagate re-entered the HDD market for notebook computers and provided the 1-inch hard drives for the first iPods . This led to a trend of digital devices being created with progressively more and more memory, especially in cameras and music devices. In September 2004, The New York Times called Seagate "the nation's top maker of hard drives used to store data in computers", following

4416-809: The Pegasos II. The Pegasos I supports the IBM Microprocessor 750CXe CPU (G3), has 100 Mbit/s Ethernet onboard and uses registered 168-pin PC133 SDR- SDRAM . It was discontinued after a hardware bug in the MAI Logic ArticiaS northbridge was discovered. Later versions of the Pegasos I came with a hardware fix which was designated "April" (a pun on Mai meaning May in German). Further improvements were made in an "April 2" design which solved further problems. It has been replaced by

4512-477: The Pegasos II. The Pegasos II uses a Marvell Discovery II MV64361 northbridge, removing the need for the "April" chipset fix on the previous model, and additionally offers integrated Gigabit LAN and DDR support, and the ability to use the Freescale "G4" processor line. The 750CXe (G3) CPU boards do not require a cooling fan, and thus has been marketed as "cool computing". The current G4 boards are based around

4608-642: The Pegasos Platform. Genesi is very eager to support any efforts to port and optimize operating systems or applications for their computers. Press Esc at a serial console (115200 baud) while booting . Hard disk drive A hard disk drive ( HDD ), hard disk , hard drive , or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads , usually arranged on

4704-472: The Seagate Board to return as CEO of the company, replacing Bill Watkins. As of the date of his hiring, Seagate was losing market share, facing rapidly declining revenues, was lagging in product delivery with high manufacturing costs, had an excessive operating expense structure, and had $ 2 billion of debt that was due within 2 years. The company's market value was less than $ 1.5 billion. Luczo revamped

4800-443: The arrowhead and radially inward on the other produces the tangential force . If the magnetic field were uniform, each side would generate opposing forces that would cancel each other out. Therefore, the surface of the magnet is half north pole and half south pole, with the radial dividing line in the middle, causing the two sides of the coil to see opposite magnetic fields and produce forces that add instead of canceling. Currents along

4896-456: The board of directors, with Al Shugart reassuming presidency of the company. Shugart refocused the company on its more lucrative markets, and on mainframe drives instead of external drives. He also pulled away from outsourcing component production overseas. This allowed Seagate to better keep up with demand for PCs, which increased extremely rapidly in 1993 across the market. This included a domestic partnership with Corning Inc. , which began using

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4992-450: The case of embedded servo, otherwise known as sector servo technology). The servo feedback optimizes the signal-to-noise ratio of the GMR sensors by adjusting the voice coil motor to rotate the arm. A more modern servo system also employs milli and/or micro actuators to more accurately position the read/write heads. The spinning of the disks uses fluid-bearing spindle motors. Modern disk firmware

5088-615: The company forecasting its quarterly revenue above Wall Street estimates. In 2004, the company separated the roles of chairman and CEO. Luczo resigned as the Seagate CEO on July 3, but retained his position as chairman of the board of directors. Bill Watkins became CEO. At the beginning of 2006, Forbes magazine named Seagate its Company of the Year as the best managed company in the United States. Forbes wrote that, "Seagate

5184-468: The company laid off 500 employees across 12 countries due to a push for better operational efficiencies. Seagate planned for the rearrangement of more resources, including combining facilities in Minnesota . In September 2020, Seagate announced it had entered the object storage business and introduced CORTX, an open-source object storage software, Lyve Rack, a reference architecture based on CORTX, and

5280-416: The company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $ 110 million. In 1983, Al Shugart was replaced as president by then chief operating officer, Tom Mitchell, in order to move forward with corporate restructuring in the face of a changing market. Shugart continued to oversee corporate planning. By this point, the company had a 45% market share of the single-user hard drive market, with IBM purchasing 60% of

5376-569: The company's Seagate Research facility was also established in Pittsburgh , a $ 30 million investment that focused on future technologies and prototypes. Technology developed by the facility would include devices like the hard drive disk for Microsoft's first Xbox . In 1999, Seagate shipped its 250 millionth hard drive. In May 1999, Seagate sold its Network & Storage Management Group (NSMG) to Veritas Software in return for 155 million shares of Veritas' stock. With this deal, Seagate became

5472-430: The company's outstanding shares. In the fiscal year ending June 2012, Seagate had achieved record revenues, record gross margins, record profits, and regained its position as the largest disc drive manufacturer. Its market value had increased to over $ 14 billion. In March 2012, Seagate demonstrated the first 1 TB/square inch density hard drive, with the possibility of scaling up to 60 TB by 2030. In 2013, Seagate

5568-435: The company. Stephen J. "Steve" Luczo became the new chief executive officer, also joining the board of directors. Luczo joined Seagate Technology in October 1993 as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development. In March 1995, he was appointed Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and chief operating officer of Seagate Software Holdings. In 1996, Luczo led the Seagate acquisition of Conner Peripherals, creating

5664-441: The connection between the drive and the host. The rate of areal density advancement was similar to Moore's law (doubling every two years) through 2010: 60% per year during 1988–1996, 100% during 1996–2003 and 30% during 2003–2010. Speaking in 1997, Gordon Moore called the increase "flabbergasting", while observing later that growth cannot continue forever. Price improvement decelerated to −12% per year during 2010–2017, as

5760-577: The deal was to unlock the value of the 33% ownership stake Seagate had in Veritas, which had put the value of Seagate's stock at around $ 33 billion even though its market cap was only $ 15 billion. Following the relocation to the Cayman Islands in 2000, the legal name of a holding company was simplified to Seagate Technology . The de facto operational company, incorporated in Delaware, became

5856-449: The disks; the stator windings are fixed in place. Opposite the actuator at the end of the head support arm is the read-write head; thin printed-circuit cables connect the read-write heads to amplifier electronics mounted at the pivot of the actuator. The head support arm is very light, but also stiff; in modern drives, acceleration at the head reaches 550 g . The actuator is a permanent magnet and moving coil motor that swings

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5952-522: The dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers , though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like mobile phones and tablets , rely on flash memory storage devices. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically , though after extensive industry consolidation, most units are manufactured by Seagate , Toshiba , and Western Digital . HDDs dominate

6048-467: The earlier IBM disk drives used only two read/write heads per arm, the 1301 used an array of 48 heads (comb), each array moving horizontally as a single unit, one head per surface used. Cylinder-mode read/write operations were supported, and the heads flew about 250 micro-inches (about 6 μm) above the platter surface. Motion of the head array depended upon a binary adder system of hydraulic actuators which assured repeatable positioning. The 1301 cabinet

6144-507: The entire management team, and quickly reorganized the company back to a functional structure after a failed attempt to organize by business units in 2007. Led by a new Head of Sales (Dave Mosley), a new head of Operations and Development (Bob Whitmore), and a new CFO (Pat O'Malley), the team worked to address the multitude of challenges that it faced. By the end of 2009, the company had refinanced its debt and had begun to turn around its operations. In 2010, Seagate reinstated its dividend and began

6240-443: The growth of areal density slowed. The rate of advancement for areal density slowed to 10% per year during 2010–2016, and there was difficulty in migrating from perpendicular recording to newer technologies. As bit cell size decreases, more data can be put onto a single drive platter. In 2013, a production desktop 3 TB HDD (with four platters) would have had an areal density of about 500 Gbit/in which would have amounted to

6336-416: The heads to the desired position. A metal plate supports a squat neodymium–iron–boron (NIB) high-flux magnet . Beneath this plate is the moving coil, often referred to as the voice coil by analogy to the coil in loudspeakers , which is attached to the actuator hub, and beneath that is a second NIB magnet, mounted on the bottom plate of the motor (some drives have only one magnet). The voice coil itself

6432-634: The holding company became a public limited company (PLC) named Seagate Technology plc . In December 2011, Seagate acquired Samsung's HDD business. Seagate also acquired a license to use Samsung trademark on HDD products for 5 years; after license expired, Seagate rebranded all Samsung-branded external HDD products to Maxtor, a company which Seagate acquired at the end of 2005. After the acquisition, internal HDDs from former Samsung factories were simultaneously branded as Samsung and Seagate, and then were exclusively branded as Seagate. In 2012, Seagate continued to raise its dividend and repurchased nearly 30% of

6528-427: The largest hard drive had a capacity of 15 TB, while the largest capacity SSD had a capacity of 100 TB. As of 2018 , HDDs were forecast to reach 100 TB capacities around 2025, but as of 2019 , the expected pace of improvement was pared back to 50 TB by 2026. Smaller form factors, 1.8-inches and below, were discontinued around 2010. The cost of solid-state storage (NAND), represented by Moore's law ,

6624-403: The largest shareholder in Veritas, with an ownership stake of more than 40%. In 2000, Seagate became a private company again. Luczo led a management buyout of Seagate, believing that Seagate needed to make significant capital investments to achieve its goals. He decided to turn the company private, since disk drive producers had a hard time obtaining capital for long-term projects. The company

6720-444: The magnetization of the material passing immediately under it. In modern drives, there is one head for each magnetic platter surface on the spindle, mounted on a common arm. An actuator arm (or access 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 arm is moved using a voice coil actuator or, in some older designs,

6816-422: The manufacturing of the read/write heads to increase the strength of the magnetic field created by the heads. In 2004, a higher-density recording media was introduced, consisting of coupled soft and hard magnetic layers. So-called exchange spring media magnetic storage technology, also known as exchange coupled composite media , allows good writability due to the write-assist nature of the soft layer. However,

6912-420: The most commonly used operating systems report capacities in powers of 1024, which results in a smaller number than advertised. Performance is specified as the time required to move the heads to a track or cylinder (average access time), the time it takes for the desired sector to move under the head (average latency , which is a function of the physical rotational speed in revolutions per minute ), and finally,

7008-559: The norm in most computer installations and reached capacities of 300 megabytes by the early 1980s. Non-removable HDDs were called "fixed disk" drives. In 1963, IBM introduced the 1302, with twice the track capacity and twice as many tracks per cylinder as the 1301. The 1302 had one (for Model 1) or two (for Model 2) modules, each containing a separate comb for the first 250 tracks and the last 250 tracks. Some high-performance HDDs were manufactured with one head per track, e.g. , Burroughs B-475 in 1964, IBM 2305 in 1970, so that no time

7104-534: The platters, increasing areal density. Normally hard drive recording heads have a pole called a main pole that is used for writing to the platters, and adjacent to this pole is an air gap and a shield. The write coil of the head surrounds the pole. The STO device is placed in the air gap between the pole and the shield to increase the strength of the magnetic field created by the pole; FC-MAMR technically doesn't use microwaves, but uses technology employed in MAMR. The STO has

7200-853: The progress of all programs. In 1998, Luczo and CTO Tom Porter called for an organizational redesign of design centers into core teams focused on individual projects, in order to meet the corporate objective of faster time to market . As the CEO, Luczo decided to increase investment in technology and to diversify into faster-growing, higher-margin businesses. He decided to implement a highly automated platform strategy for manufacturing. Between 1997 and 2004, Seagate reduced its headcount from approximately 111,000 to approximately 50,000, reduced its manufacturing factories from 24 to 11, and reduced design centers from seven to three. During this period, Seagate's output increased from approximately 9 million drives per quarter to approximately 20 million drives per quarter. In 1998,

7296-416: The revenue of hard disk drives as of 2017 . Though SSDs have four to nine times higher cost per bit, they are replacing HDDs in applications where speed, power consumption, small size, high capacity and durability are important. As of 2019 , the cost per bit of SSDs is falling, and the price premium over HDDs has narrowed. The primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance . Capacity

7392-506: The shutdown of one of its largest HDD assembly plants, located in Suzhou, China . The plant became part of Seagate after Maxtor's acquisition in 2006; Maxtor started producing hard drives in Suzhou in 2004. On July 25, 2017, David "Dave" Mosley was appointed CEO, effective from October 1, 2017 after longtime CEO, Steve Luczo stepped down and became executive chairman. In June 2018, Seagate

7488-427: The speed at which the data is transmitted (data rate). The two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3.5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2.5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard interface cables such as SATA (Serial ATA), USB , SAS ( Serial Attached SCSI ), or PATA (Parallel ATA) cables. The first production IBM hard disk drive, the 350 disk storage , shipped in 1957 as

7584-438: The stack of disk platters when the drive was powered down. Instead, the heads were allowed to "land" on a special area of the disk surface upon spin-down, "taking off" again when the disk was later powered on. This greatly reduced the cost of the head actuator mechanism, but precluded removing just the disks from the drive as was done with the disk packs of the day. Instead, the first models of "Winchester technology" drives featured

7680-450: The swing arm actuator design to make possible the compact form factors of modern HDDs. As the 1980s began, HDDs were a rare and very expensive additional feature in PCs, but by the late 1980s, their cost had been reduced to the point where they were standard on all but the cheapest computers. Most HDDs in the early 1980s were sold to PC end users as an external, add-on subsystem. The subsystem

7776-439: The table above. Applications expanded through the 2000s, from the mainframe computers of the late 1950s to most mass storage applications including computers and consumer applications such as storage of entertainment content. In the 2000s and 2010s, NAND began supplanting HDDs in applications requiring portability or high performance. NAND performance is improving faster than HDDs, and applications for HDDs are eroding. In 2018,

7872-400: The thermal stability is determined only by the hardest layer and not influenced by the soft layer. Flux control MAMR (FC-MAMR) allows a hard drive to have increased recording capacity without the need for new hard disk drive platter materials. MAMR hard drives have a microwave generating spin torque generator (STO) on the read/write heads which allows physically smaller bits to be recorded to

7968-575: The ticker symbol SEG. Upon leaving, the company was the 17th-largest company in terms of trading volume on the Nasdaq exchange. In 1996, Seagate merged with Conner Peripherals to form the world's largest independent hard-drive manufacturer. Following the merger, the company began a system of consolidating the components and production methods within its production chain of factories in order to streamline how products were built between plants. In May 1995, Seagate Technology acquired Frye Computer Systems,

8064-475: The top and bottom of the coil produce radial forces that do not rotate the head. The HDD's electronics controls the movement of the actuator and the rotation of the disk and transfers data to/from a disk controller . Feedback of the drive electronics is accomplished by means of special segments of the disk dedicated to servo feedback. These are either complete concentric circles (in the case of dedicated servo technology) or segments interspersed with real data (in

8160-427: The total business Seagate was doing at the time. In 1989, Seagate acquired Imprimis Technology, the disk storage division of Control Data Corporation , resulting in a combined market share of 43%. Seagate benefited from Imprimis' head technology and reputation while Imprimis gained access to Seagate's lower component and manufacturing costs. In September 1991, Tom Mitchell resigned as president under pressure from

8256-491: The total number of errors in the entire HDD fixed by ECC (although not on all hard drives as the related S.M.A.R.T attributes "Hardware ECC Recovered" and "Soft ECC Correction" are not consistently supported), and the total number of performed sector remappings, as the occurrence of many such errors may predict an HDD failure . The "No-ID Format", developed by IBM in the mid-1990s, contains information about which sectors are bad and where remapped sectors have been located. Only

8352-433: The usual filtered air. Since turbulence and friction are reduced, higher areal densities can be achieved due to using a smaller track width, and the energy dissipated due to friction is lower as well, resulting in a lower power draw. Furthermore, more platters can be fit into the same enclosure space, although helium gas is notoriously difficult to prevent escaping. Thus, helium drives are completely sealed and do not have

8448-499: The volume of storage produced ( exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly (by exabytes shipped ), sales revenues and unit shipments are declining, because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, somewhat better reliability, and much lower latency and access times. The revenues for SSDs, most of which use NAND flash memory , slightly exceeded those for HDDs in 2018. Flash storage products had more than twice

8544-469: The world's largest disk drive manufacturer and completing the company's strategy of vertical integration and ownership of key disk drive components. In September 1997, he was promoted to the positions of President and Chief Operating Officer. In 1998, the board appointed Luczo as the new CEO and Seagate launched a restructuring effort. Historically, Seagate's design centers had been organized around function, with one product line manager in charge of tracking

8640-536: Was incorporated in Grand Cayman and stayed private until it re-entered the public market in 2002. In early November 1999, Luczo met with representatives of Silver Lake Partners to discuss a major restructuring of Seagate. After two failed attempts to increase Seagate's stock price and unlock its value from Veritas, Seagate's board of directors authorized Luczo to seek advice from Morgan Stanley in October 1999. In early November 1999, Morgan Stanley arranged

8736-520: Was about the size of three large refrigerators placed side by side, storing the equivalent of about 21 million eight-bit bytes per module. Access time was about a quarter of a second. Also in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, which was about the size of a washing machine and stored two million characters on a removable disk pack . Users could buy additional packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape . Later models of removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became

8832-646: Was honored at the 14th Annual Manufacturing Leadership Awards Gala in Huntington Beach, California . In 2018, Seagate invested in Series A and B of Ripple , an enterprise blockchain company . In 2019, Seagate invested £47 million in a research and development project at its factory in Derry , Northern Ireland. In 2020, Seagate announced that it was moving its headquarters and most of its staff from Cupertino to Fremont, California. From May to June that year,

8928-427: Was lost physically moving the heads to a track and the only latency was the time for the desired block of data to rotate into position under the head. Known as fixed-head or head-per-track disk drives, they were very expensive and are no longer in production. In 1973, IBM introduced a new type of HDD code-named " Winchester ". Its primary distinguishing feature was that the disk heads were not withdrawn completely from

9024-465: Was not sold under the drive manufacturer's name but under the subsystem manufacturer's name such as Corvus Systems and Tallgrass Technologies , or under the PC system manufacturer's name such as the Apple ProFile . The IBM PC/XT in 1983 included an internal 10 MB HDD, and soon thereafter, internal HDDs proliferated on personal computers. External HDDs remained popular for much longer on

9120-639: Was the first HDD company to begin shipment of shingled magnetic recording drives, announcing in September that they had already shipped over 1 million such drives. In February 2016, Seagate received a class action lawsuit concerning defective hard drives. In August 2016, Seagate demonstrated its 60 TB SSD—claimed to be "the largest SSD ever demonstrated"—at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. In January 2017, Seagate announced

9216-408: Was the norm. As of November 2019 , the platters in most consumer-grade HDDs spin at 5,400 or 7,200 rpm. Information is written to and read from a platter as it rotates past devices called read-and-write heads that are positioned to operate very close to the magnetic surface, with their flying height often in the range of tens of nanometers. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify

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