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Article Excerpt
THE first disk storage system was invented in 1956 by IBM. The 305 RAMAC combined 50 hard disks, each measuring two feet in diameter, and had a storage capacity of five megabytes. The average hard disk inside a computer today measures just 3.5 inches across and has a memory capacity almost 10,000 times the capacity, and memory almost 20 million times the density, of the first IBM machine.
"As IBM was the technological leader, most hard disk manufacturers were based in the United States. Fierce competition in recent years has allowed only three Japanese manufacturers to survive.
"Research and development is done in the United States or Japan, assembly work is done in China and Southeast Asia, and the manufacturing of key components, such as the spindle motor and head, is done in Japan. This global division of work became the norm for the manufacturing of hard disks even earlier than it did for the automobile industry."
So says Takagi Yasuji, who heads up the R&D Department in the DDS Division of NHK Spring. Takagi has worked on suspensions for nearly 20 years, since the time NHK Spring started manufacturing this precision component.
"At the time, Hutchinson Technology Incorporated of the United States dominated the market for suspensions. But the...
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