HISTORY: List of 220 Companies in HDD Manufacturing Since 1956

218 companies worldwide have taken a stab at HDD assembly production – not including components -, only to be shot down in the end by Winchester with now only three remaining (Seagate, Toshiba and WD). The other ones didn’t survive or were acquired.

We’ve gathered all of them here in our HDD Graveyard, based on a list from Seagate, modified by the late Jim Porter from Disk/Trend, and others.

After the introduction of the first HDD, the IBM RAMAC in 1956, several big computer firms entered in this field to compete with large and expansive IBM-compatible devices like Control Data, Memorex, Univac, Storage Technology and others, using disks with a diameter of eight inches and more.

The market completely changes with the arrival of Seagate Technology launching the first small form-factor (5.25-inch) HDD, named ST506 (5MB). Then there was an incredible number of firms arriving to try to compete in this growing market with products in same volume and then smaller ones:

3.5-inch where Rodime – at 10MB – was a pioneer in 1983,
2.5-inch introduced by PrairieTek – at 20MB – in 1988,
1.8-inch by Integral Peripherals – at 21.4MB -in 1991, 1.3-inch by HP -at 21.4MB – in 1992,
1.0-inch from IBM – at 340MB – in 1999, and
even 0.85-inch by Toshiba – at 4GB – in 2004.

Now there are only 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch rotating disk drives on the market and a small production of 1.8-inch units by Toshiba, smaller form factors being eliminated by flash memories.

The big majority of all HDD makers came from USA, some of them from Europe (Bull, Rodime, Siemens, etc.) and Asia (Alps, GS-Magicstor, Hitachi, MKE, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, etc.).

Seagate was also the first US company to manufacture HDDs outside USA with a plant in Singapore. Now about all component and assembly plants are based in just four countries: China, Korea, Malaysia and Thailand.

In Europe, there was a total of 22 manufacturing facilities, all closed but one: Seagate’s plant in Springtown, Londonderry Plant, Northern Ireland, making disk heads on wafers.

In the list below are included manufacturers of HDDs with removable rigid disks (Castlewood, Iomega, Nomai, SyQuest, etc.)

Should you have any additions or corrections, please let us know.

HDD MANUFACTURERS STILL AROUND