ABSTRACT
The single most important electromechanical device in the entire set of components of a storage system is its media—the spinning hard disk drive—which is written to and read from on a nearly continuous basis. The achievements obtained from the earliest IBM drives of the 1950s to the present modern area of storage are remarkable. Through the development and combination of mechanical systems, magnetic materials, and electronic control interfaces, the digital age has moved well into the information age almost in similar fashion to how the invention of the transistor and its extreme counterpart the microprocessor helped mold the computer and electronics industries we've grown to depend on.
