15 Years Of Hard Drive History: Capacities Outran Performance

Features
By Patrick Schmid
published

512 kB Cache: IBM DTTA-351010 (1998)

With the DeskStar 16GP series, IBM introduced Giant Magneto-Resistive (GMR) heads, an important step in exceeding capacities of 10 GB per drive. In fact, the introduction of the much more sensitive GMR heads allowed an increase of the maximum per-drive capacity from almost 9 GB to 16.8 GB for the IBM product lines.

This drive family came in a large variety of capacities: 3.2, 4.3, 6.4, 8.4, 10.1, 12.9 and 16.8 GB, using up to three platters. The drives were equipped with an upgraded 512 kB drive cache memory, and the UltraATA/33 interface. The DTTA-351010 reached maximum data transfer rates of 12.4 MB/s, while it was capable of exploiting the full interface bandwidth at 31.4 MB/s.

Patrick Schmid
3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • There is a typo in the article:

    Quantum's Fireball was available about five years after the 40 GB Maxtor drive discussed above,

    It should be 40MB, obviously
    Reply
  • badcat
    "And Samsung, finally, may have a decent advantage in the future with a possible hybrid hard drive; it is the only firm in this quartet that manufactures both magnetic and Flash storage." WRONG! This technology existed in enterprise level hard disks for some time now.
    Reply
  • i am still looking a 40Mb hard disk for my machine in 386dx
    Reply