White Paper: Deploying The Next Generation Of High-Capacity Hard Drives

By Seagate

A Brief History of Storage Architectures

It has been 30 years since a small software company made an agreement with IBM to produce the first operating system for what would become the IBM PC. That company was, of course, Microsoft and the operating system was DOS or PC-DOS, as it became branded by IBM. DOS became the basis for the operating system that would be broadly adopted as the standard in the PC industry and would also serve as the foundation for many aspects of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

In those early days, no one really envisioned the incredible advancements in the computer industry that would ultimately lead to today's super fast processers, massive solid state memory and huge hard drives, now commonly available in sizes up to 2-TB. Some of the basic design decisions made in the original computer architecture, both hardware and software, left the industry with inherent limitations. One of those limitations is impacting the storage industry today — the ability to address hard drives that exceed 2.1-TB capacities.