Features

SAN JOSE — Next to semiconductors that keep screaming more and more gigahertz, there’s a quieter catalyst for ever more powerful and shrinking high-tech gadgets: hard drives. 

Disk drives keep our personal digital data — from treasured e-mails and personal finance records to photos and music. On a larger level, they are repositories of critical databases, storing everything from bank transactions to government documents. 

Now the magnetic drives are getting cheaper, smaller and denser than ever, cropping up in all kinds of devices, fueling society’s unstoppable transition to all things digital. 

Hard drives now come in packages almost as small as a quarter. 

IBM Corp.’s 1-gigabyte Microdrive holds the equivalent of 700 floppy disks in a half-ounce, one-inch package. And credit-card sized hard drives in laptops can now hold 20 GB of data. 

Worldwide shipments of hard drives — the majority of which still go to PCs — dipped with the economic downturn to 196 million in 2001 from 200 million the previous year. 

But boosted largely by hard drives’ inclusion in devices other than PCs, shipments should rise to 213 million this year and to 352 million in 2006, the market research firm International Data Corp predicts. 

The cost of hard drive storage has dropped from $10,000 per megabyte when IBM invented the hard drive in 1956 — a few years before Fairchild Semiconductor invented the integrated circuit — to about $1 per gigabyte today. 

And that means hard drives are cheap enough to put anywhere we’d want to store data. 

Seagate Technology, a leading drive maker, has now dedicated a lab to work exclusively with electronics manufacturers who are building hard drives into home media servers, personal digital video recorders, cable and satellite set-top boxes, game consoles, audio jukeboxes and home security systems. 

Microsoft’s Xbox game console has a hard drive and Sony plans to integrate one in its Playstation2. 

Toshiba Corp.’s 1.8-inch hard disk allowed Apple Computer Inc.’s pocket-sized iPod to hold 5 GB of data, or 1,000 songs, when the portable music player debuted last year. Toshiba has since quadrupled the drive’s capacity. 

Makers of car accessories are also big on hard drives. 

PhatNoise Inc. is using a rugged 2.5-inch Toshiba hard drive to power its car jukebox while Blaupunkt has an audio player that allows users to download 18 hours worth of music onto a Microdrive. 

Such drives can be costly — a 1 GB Microdrive is $369 retail. 

Solid-state flash memory such as CompactFlash, SD cards and Memory Sticks, are generally less expensive but store far less data than hard drives. 

With hard drives, bits of data — in the form of 0s and 1s — are stored in magnetic patterns onto rotating disks coated with iron oxide. Similar to the needle of a phonograph, an electromagnetic head moves above the disk to read or record the data. 

Disk speeds doubled in the 1990s: most hard drives in PCs and consumer devices spin at 3,600 or 7,200 RPM, while high-performance ones for large computer servers hum at 15,000 RPMs. 

At the same time, more data is getting squeezed into smaller areas, with capacity doubling nearly each year. Hard drive makers are also switching to fluid- instead of ball-bearing motors. 

These improvements have made hard drives more reliable, faster at finding blocks of data, and quieter. 

But as incredible a technological feat as they are, hard drives — as mechanical devices with moving parts — have a limited life span. 

Hard drives experience wear and tear each time a computer is turned on and off. They generally come with three- to five-year warranties and analysts say it’s best not to trust them to last that long. 

That’s why for long-term storage of data, backups — either onto another hard disk or onto CDs or other hardier storage mediums — are always recommended. 

“If you have a gigabyte of photos stored on a portable disk that cost you $350, the last thing you want to do is lose those,” said Dave Reinsel, a hard disk drive industry research manager at IDC. “It’s like pulling your negatives out of the roll — it’s gone forever.” 

To show for her neglect in data backup, Ellen Silverberg of Farmington Hills, Mich. has a $1,300 bill from a data recovery company. 

A virus-triggered crash of her home computer’s 8 GB drive erased years of e-mails, hundreds of photos of her baby son, tons of contacts, her archive of homemade birthday and Christmas cards and a 900-member family tree. 

The Ford Motor Co. product development manager was able to salvage the digital pieces of her life — for about the cost of a new, more powerful computer. 

But a hard disk drive’s value is not lost on Silverberg. She remains devoted to the whirring magnetic platters of data storage. 

“You can’t give up on this kind of technology,” she said. “It’s like giving up the telephone.”