Hard Disk Drive Manufacturing: From RAMAC to ABB Robots

Hard disk drive manufacturing is in the news because AI data centers want more storage than the industry can supply. On 2 October 2026 reports said Toshiba plans to roughly double its drive output by fiscal 2027, an expansion Blocks and Files put at about 380 million dollars. This post covers how the hard disk began with IBM's RAMAC in 1956, how drives are built today in cleanrooms, and where ABB robots could handle heads, platters and finished drives. It also asks what a plant needs before it can double output.

A Seagate Exos X12 hard drive with 12 TB of capacity. Photo: David290 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From a room sized RAMAC to the Winchester drive

IBM announced the 350 disk storage unit, part of the 305 RAMAC system, on 14 September 1956. Wikipedia says it held about 5 million characters on fifty 24 inch disks, and that it was developed and built at IBM's research facility in San Jose, California. Two servo controlled access arms found a record in about 600 milliseconds on average. Customers leased the system for 3,200 dollars a month. It was a large mechanical assembly, very far from the production lines that make drives today.

The disk mechanism of an IBM 350 RAMAC on display in a museum. Photo: ArnoldReinhold / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Winchester drive changed the design. In 1973 IBM's 3340 let the heads land on a special area of the disk when it spun down, instead of being withdrawn from the platters, and the first models used a removable disk module. In 1974 IBM added the swinging arm actuator, which later became nearly universal. IBM's 0680 of 1978 used 8 inch platters, and 5.25 inch drives followed, sized to replace floppy drives for the PC market. Each shrink made the parts smaller and the tolerances tighter.

A 14 inch magnetic disk for Winchester type memory made by IBM Italia, in a Milan museum. Photo: I.B.M. Italia / Museo scienza tecnologia Milano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Consolidation followed. Wikipedia counts more than 224 companies that have made hard disk drives, and says most units now come from Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. Western Digital closed its last Malaysian HDD factory in 2019. Inside the drive, platters are made of aluminum alloy, glass or ceramic and coated with a magnetic layer about 10 to 20 nanometres deep under a carbon overcoat. Heads fly tens of nanometres above the surface. HGST, now part of Western Digital, developed sealed helium filled drives, in which less turbulence allows more platters.

The inside of a Seagate ST33232A hard disk, showing platters and the actuator arm. Photo: Eric Gaba / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cleanroom lines and Toshiba's doubling plan

Those tolerances explain why assembly happens in cleanrooms. Trade coverage of cleanroom robotics warns that robots can shed particles from belts, outgas from cables and hoses, and create dust at the gripper, all of which are contamination sources for fragile products such as hard drives and semiconductors. A drive line therefore needs robots with sealed bodies and clean cable routing, and handling that touches parts as little as possible. The same coverage lists hard disk drives next to semiconductors as products where this matters.

A Western Digital Caviar drive opened to show its platter, spindle and head. Photo: Mk2010 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The Toshiba news shows how much volume is involved. Blocks and Files reported on 6 October 2026 that Toshiba aims to roughly double annual capacity at its Laguna Technopark plant in the Philippines by fiscal 2027 compared with fiscal 2025. The new lines are meant to build drives with up to 40 percent more capacity each, and the company still works toward 65 terabyte drives in 2030 and later 100 terabyte ones. The article puts Toshiba at about 11 percent of the market against roughly 44 percent each for Seagate and Western Digital, and says Toshiba wants 30 percent in three to five years.

The actuator arm assembly of a hard disk drive, with its read and write head at the tip. Photo: Mk2010 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Where do ABB robots fit? I found no source tying ABB to Seagate, Toshiba or Western Digital, so this is a possibility and not a project. ABB does sell cleanroom robots. The IRB 120 cleanroom version has been certified by Fraunhofer IPA to ISO 5, and the IRB 1100 cleanroom version to ISO 4, according to trade reports and ABB's own announcements, and the IRB 1300 Clean Room is another compact arm. Our post on ABB cleanroom robots in chip fabs covers how those arms work. SCARA models such as the IRB 930 suit fast pick and place work on small parts.

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot working over trays of parts. Photo: ABB

What the next drives and plants will need

Capacity per drive is the other half of Toshiba's plan. Up to 40 percent more capacity per drive points to finer heads and tighter assembly, and robots place parts the same way every cycle while cameras can check each placement. Programs for such cells are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, so a robot's reach and cycle time are known before any hardware is installed. I found no maker describing exactly this use of ABB equipment, so read it as a direction and not as a result.

An engineer with an ABB IRB 930 SCARA robot, launched in 2023 for electronics and battery assembly. Photo: ABB

Several problems remain. A new line has to qualify as clean before it runs, and every robot in it adds a possible source of particles. Supply is another limit: a Citi analyst, quoted in a French language report on the Toshiba plan, reportedly sees limited near term impact because Toshiba relies on outside suppliers for platters and heads. Skills matter as well, since cleanroom robot cells need technicians who understand grippers and contamination control. Homes feel none of this directly, though drive cost and supply reach them through cloud storage and home network storage.

An industrial robot in a clean room at BBS Automation in Blaichach, Germany. Photo: Clemenspool / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Drives also come back at the end of their life. Molg builds robotic microfactories that use ABB robots to take apart server hardware from data centers, which is the other end of the hard disk's story. Our post on ABB robots in data centers covers that side. The plant that makes the drive and the microfactory that recycles it both depend on repeatable handling of small, delicate and heavy parts, which is the kind of work industrial robots already do.

Two ABB robots on top of a Molg robotic microfactory for data center e-waste. Photo: ABB

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