Hard Disk Drive (III)

Disk interface families used in personal computers

Notable families of disk interfaces include:

• Historical bit serial interfaces — connected to a hard disk drive controller with three cables, one for data, one for control and one for power. The HDD controller provided significant functions such as serial to parallel conversion, data separation and track formatting, and required matching to the drive in order to assure reliability.
• ST506 used MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation) for the data encoding method.
• ST412 was available in either MFM or RLL (Run Length Limited) variants.
• Enhanced Small Disk Interface (ESDI) was an interface developed by Maxtor to allow faster communication between the PC and the disk than MFM or RLL.

• Modern bit serial interfaces — connect to a host bus adapter (today typically integrated into the "south bridge") with two cables, one for data/control and one for power.
• Fibre Channel (FC), is a successor to parallel SCSI interface on enterprise market. It is a serial protocol. In disk drives usually the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) connection topology is used. FC has much broader usage than mere disk interfaces, it is the cornerstone of storage area networks (SANs). Recently other protocols for this field, like iSCSI and ATA over Ethernet have been developed as well. Confusingly, drives usually use copper twisted-pair cables for Fibre Channel, not fibre optics. The latter are traditionally reserved for larger devices, such as servers or disk array controllers.
• Serial ATA (SATA). The SATA data cable has one data pair for differential transmission of data to the device, and one pair for differential receiving from the device, just like EIA-422. That requires that data be transmitted serially. The same differential signaling system is used in RS485, LocalTalk, USB, Firewire, and differential SCSI.
• Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). The SAS is a new generation serial communication protocol for devices designed to allow for much higher speed data transfers and is compatible with SATA. SAS uses serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices but still uses SCSI commands.

• Word serial interfaces — connect to a host bus adapter (today typically integrated into the "south bridge") with two cables, one for data/control and one for power. The earliest versions of these interfaces typically had a 16 bit parallel data transfer to/from the drive and there are 8 and 32 bit variants. Modern versions have serial data transfer. The word nature of data transfer makes the design of a host bus adapter significantly simpler than that of the precursor HDD controller.
• Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), later renamed to ATA, and then later to PATA ("parallel ATA", to distinguish it from the new Serial ATA). The original name reflected the innovative integration of HDD controller with HDD itself, which was not found in earlier disks. Moving the HDD controller from the interface card to the disk drive helped to standardize interfaces, including reducing the cost and complexity. The 40 pin IDE/ATA connection of PATA transfers 16 bits of data at a time on the data cable. The data cable was originally 40 conductor, but later higher speed requirements for data transfer to and from the hard drive led to an "ultra DMA" mode, known as UDMA. Progressively faster versions of this standard ultimately added the requirement for an 80 conductor variant of the same cable; the other conductors provided the grounding necessary for enhanced high-speed signal quality by the reduction of cross talk. The interface for 80 conductor only has 39 pins, the missing pin acting as a key to prevent incorrect insertion of the connector to an incompatible socket, a common cause of disk and controller damage.
• EIDE was an unofficial update (by Western Digital) to the original IDE standard, with the key improvement being the use of direct memory access (DMA) to transfer data between the disk and the computer without the involvement of the CPU, an improvement later adopted by the official ATA standards. By directly transferring data between memory and disk, DMA does not require the CPU/program/operating system to leave other tasks idle while the data transfer occurs.
• Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), originally named SASI for Shugart Associates System Interface, was an early competitor of ESDI. SCSI disks were standard on servers, workstations, and Apple Macintosh computers through the mid-90s, by which time most models had been transitioned to IDE (and later, SATA) family disks. Only in 2005 did the capacity of SCSI disks fall behind IDE disk technology, though the highest-performance disks are still available in SCSI and Fibre Channel only. The length limitations of the data cable allows for external SCSI devices. Originally SCSI data cables used single ended data transmission, but server class SCSI could use differential transmission, either low voltage differential (LVD) or high voltage differential (HVD).

Manufacturers

The technological resources and know-how required for modern drive development and production mean that as of 2007, over 98% of the world's HDDs are manufactured by just a handful of large firms: Seagate (which now owns Maxtor), Western Digital, Samsung, and Hitachi (which owns the former disk manufacturing division of IBM). Fujitsu continues to make mobile- and server-class disks but exited the desktop-class market in 2001, and is reportedly selling the rest to Western Digital. Toshiba is a major manufacturer of 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch notebook disks. Excelstore is a small HDD manufacturer.

Dozens of former HDD manufacturers have gone out of business, merged, or closed their HDD divisions; as capacities and demand for products increased, profits became hard to find, and the market underwent significant consolidation in the late 1980s and late 1990s. The first notable casualty of the business in the PC era was Computer Memories Inc. or CMI; after an incident with faulty 20 MB AT disks in 1985, CMI's reputation never recovered, and they exited the HDD business in 1987. Another notable failure was MiniScribe, who went bankrupt in 1990 after it was found that they had engaged in accounting fraud and inflated sales numbers for several years. Many other smaller companies (like Kalok, MicroScience, LaPine, Areal, Priam and PrairieTek) also did not survive the shakeout, and had disappeared by 1993; Micropolis was able to hold on until 1997, and JTS, a relative latecomer to the scene, lasted only a few years and was gone by 1999, after attempting to manufacture HDDs in India. Their claim to fame was creating a new 3″ form factor drive for use in laptops. Quantum and Integral also invested in the 3″ form factor; but eventually gave up as this form factor failed to catch on. Rodime was also an important manufacturer during the 1980s, but stopped making disks in the early 1990s amid the shakeout and now concentrates on technology licensing; they hold a number of patents related to 3.5-inch form factor HDDs.

Data and source mostly taken from Wikipedia.