ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a high-level view of the principles and
technologies that enable hard disk drives (HDDs) to store massive
amounts of digital information, highlighting, at the component level,
some of the major innovations or features that made possible the
approximately 500 million increase in recording areal density from
the introduction of the first IBM RAMAC drive in 1956 operating at
2000 bits/in2 to the latest commercially available state-of-the-art
drives of 2015 approaching the 1 Tb/in2 mark.
