Chronology
Events sit on a continuous spine with year markers. When dates or capacities are vendor-specific, we mark the certainty level and link primary sources.
IBM shipped the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC) with the 350 disk storage unit: roughly 5 million 7-bit characters on fifty 24-inch platters, accessed via a moving head.
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IBM’s “Winchester” program sealed heads, lubricated disks, and a compact form factor—patterns that defined later 3.5-inch and 5.25-inch hard drives for decades.
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ANSI X3.131-1986 (SCSI) gave workstations and servers a shared command set and parallel bus that could chain multiple devices—an alternative to ST-506/ST-412 style interfaces.
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Fujio Masuoka’s team at Toshiba developed NAND-type flash memory—block-erasable cells that later underpinned USB sticks, SD cards, and SSDs.
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Integrated Drive Electronics moved the controller onto the drive and standardized register commands; PCI-era PCs adopted Parallel ATA as the default internal HDD interface.
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SATA replaced wide parallel cables with a point-to-point serial link, simplifying cabling and enabling higher signaling rates for consumer and enterprise HDDs.
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Vendors began shipping SMR drives that overlap tracks like roof shingles, trading random-write behavior for higher areal density on the same platters.
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NVM Express defined a lean command set and queue model for PCIe-attached non-volatile memory, reducing latency versus AHCI/SATA for flash and future media.
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Seagate publicly positions Mozaic HAMR CMR models at 28–32 TB class capacities as shipping products, extending perpendicular/CMR architectures with heat-assisted writes.
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