The commercial usage of hard disk drives began in 1956 with the shipment of an IBM 305 RAMAC system including IBM Model 350 disk storage.

For many years, hard disk drives were large, cumbersome devices, more suited to use in the protected environment of a data center or large office than in a harsh industrial environment (due to their delicacy), or small office or home (due to their size and power consumption). Before the early 1980s, most hard disk drives had 8-inch (actually, 210 - 195 mm) or 14-inch platters, required an equipment rack or a large amount of floor space (particularly the large removable-media drives, which were frequently comparable in size to washing machines), and in many cases needed high-amperage and/or three-phase power hookups due to the large motors they used. Because of this, hard disk drives were not frequently used with microcomputers until after 1980, when Seagate Technology introduced the ST-506, the first 5.25-inch hard drive, with a formatted capacity of 5 megabytes.

The capacity of hard drives has grown exponentially over time. With early personal computers, a drive with a 20 megabyte capacity was considered large. During the mid to late 1990s, when PCs were capable of storing not just text files and documents but pictures, music, and video, internal drives were made with 8 to 20 GB capacities. As of late 2007, desktop hard disk drives typically have a capacity of 100 to 500 gigabytes, while the largest-capacity drives are 1 terabyte.

1950s - 1970s

Main article: early IBM disk storage

The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head assembly having two heads was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow (just under 1 second).

The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit, announced in 1961, introduced the usage of a head for each data surface with the heads having self acting air resembleings (flying heads).

The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive, which used the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters.

In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated media. All modern disk drives now use this technology and/or derivatives thereof. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of it was planned to have two 30 MB spindles; however, the actual product shipped with two spindles for data modules of either 35 MB or 70 MB.

1980s - PC era

Internal drives became the system of choice on PCs in the 1980s. Most microcomputer hard disk drives in the early 1980s were not sold under their manufacturer's names, but by OEMs as part of larger peripherals (such as the Corvus Disk System and the Apple ProFile). The IBM PC/XT had an internal hard disk drive, however, and this started a trend toward buying "bare" drives (often by mail order) and installing them directly into a system.

External hard drives remained popular for much longer on the Apple Macintosh and other platforms. Every Mac made between 1986 and 1998 has a SCSI port on the back, making external expansion easy; also, "toaster" Compact Macs did not have easily accessible hard drive bays (or, in the case of the Mac Plus, any hard drive bay at all), so on those models, external SCSI disks were the only reasonable option.

Timeline

1950s thru 1990s

see: Five Decades Of Disk Drive Industry Firsts maintained by Disk/Trend an HDD industry marketing consultancy.

1980s to present day

1980 - The world's first gigabyte-capacity disk drive, the IBM 3380, was the size of a refrigerator, weighed 550 pounds (about 250 kg), and had a price tag of $40,000.

1986 - Standardization of SCSI

1989 - Jimmy Zhu and H. Neal Bertram from UCSD proposed exchange decoupled granular microstructure for thin film disk storage media, still used today.

1991 - 2.5-inch 100 megabyte hard drive

1991 - PRML Technology (Digital Read Channel with 'Partial Response Maximum Likelihood' algorithm)

1992 - first 1.3-inch hard disk drive - HP C3013A

1994 - IBM introduces Laser Textured Landing Zones (LZT)

1996 - IBM introduces GMR (Giant MR) Technology for read sensors

1998 - UltraDMA/33 and ATAPI standardized

1999 - IBM releases the Microdrive in 170 MB and 340 MB capacities

2002 - 137 GB addressing space barrier broken

2003 - Serial ATA introduced

2005 - First 500 GB hard drive shipping (Hitachi GST)

2005 - Serial ATA 3G standardized

2005 - Seagate introduces Tunnel MagnetoResistive Read Sensor (TMR) and Thermal Spacing Control

2005 - Introduction of faster SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)

2005 - Perpendicular recording introduced in consumer HDDs (Toshiba)

2006 - First 750 GB hard drive (Seagate)

2006 - First 200 GB 2.5" hard drive utilizing Perpendicular recording (Toshiba)

2006 - Fujitsu develops heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that could one day achieve one terabit per square inch densities.

2007 - Hitachi GST introduces 1 terabyte hard drive