When did they start making hard-drive platters out of glass?

[delooper]

Hey there,

I got my first computer in either 1980 or 1981, a 4.77MHz PC XT. When a hard drive failed back then you could tell because it would sound like a Boeing 747 taking off.

Long story short, I was taking some old hard drives to pieces to see how modern ones compare to the old-fashioned ones. Wow, they're different. The big difference I notice is the hard drive platters are made out of some kind of glass. It appears they're mainly glass with a *very* thin metallic/magnetic coating. When did that change happen?

Sometime in the early 90's I remember hard drive technology was vastly improved -- affordable drives with 1Gb of storage. Was it that revolution? In the late 80's they used to be all metal.

Curious,

[Seraph]

IBM started putting them in consumer hard drives in or around 2000, and they were available in SCSI drives back in the 90's. After a brief search I managed to find an article in Infoworld back in 1989 talking about how glass hard drive patters were possible in the future.

That said, desktop hard drives frequently had aluminum platters in them in the 2000's, IBM was the only company making them in 2003. I believe just about all laptop drives were glass platter by then.

[delooper]

Neat. I wish I knew a few days ago. I was taking my hard drive apart. Didn't have the proper tool so I was using a grinder. Was convinced the platter was a metal, until sharp shards of glass went flying all over the room. Most of it turned into dust so thankfully little damage was done.

[Soralin]

Sometime in the early 90's I remember hard drive technology was vastly improved -- affordable drives with 1Gb of storage. Was it that revolution? In the late 80's they used to be all metal.

Nah, that was largely due to the discovery of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance effect, that allowed for much more sensitive read heads on hard drives. The discoverers of it won a Nobel prize for it a while back.