I clearly remember getting my first MP3 player, which replaced my aging portable CD player in the mid 2000s. It was some no-name device with the build quality of a wet matchbox, but it was small and sounded just as good to my ear. The only problem was the storage space—it only held 1GB of data. That’s still a decent number of MP3s, but a lack of storage was a problem that plagued virtually all MP3 players up to that point—until Apple solved the issue in a novel way: a teeny-tiny hard drive!
The iPod didn’t use flash memory—because it was barely a thing yet
Today, there are basically no portable devices that still use spinning hard drives. Even laptops now favor solid-state flash memory. While hard drives aren’t going anywhere, you’ll mainly see them used in external USB drives, or as mass storage inside large desktop PCs or in data center servers.
In the early 2000s however, flash memory was so expensive, it wasn’t really feasible in decent capacities. In 2002, I had to save for a 64MB (yes, megabyte) flash drive and MP3 players from the late 90s came in capacities like 32MB. Far smaller than the 1GB player I would pick up years later.
The 20-Year-Old MP3 Player That’s Still My Surfing Companion
Old iPod, new waves. My retro gear proves some tech really does last.
For Apple’s planned music player, flash memory just wasn’t available in the capacities and at the cost necessary to make what it considered a worthy device. Apple’s whole plan rested on selling people digital music, and it wanted them to store that entire collection of songs on their music player.
If you want to put thousands of CD-quality songs in your pocket, it wasn’t going to happen in the late ’90s using solid state memory, so Apple had to look elsewhere.
A Japanese camera company accidentally created the iPod’s secret weapon
On the other side of the world—in Japan—engineers at Toshiba had invented a miraculous storage device that literally no one had asked for. A tiny 1.8-inch hard drive with a capacity of several gigabytes. It was a solution looking for a problem, and Toshiba hadn’t found one yet, not even for its own products. Though it clearly had potential for digital video cameras.
it’s some sort of cosmic serendipity that Apple had a need these tiny hard drives could fulfill, and they both happened to be ready for one another at the same time. Apple wasted no time once it got wind of these hard drives, and it bought up virtually the entire supply for the foreseeable future. Not only did this ensure that Apple’s music player could be produced in massive numbers, it also meant that no one could compete. Toshiba was the only company making these hard drives, and Apple nearly bought them all. Apple wouldn’t have this advantage forever, but for a while it was the only company who could get these drives in significant numbers.
These miniature HDDs were mechanical miracles
If you know anything about hard drives, you know that the last thing you should do with a running drive is move it. There are numerous moving parts inside spinning at high speed, hovering microns away from destruction, and I think it’s a miracle that hard drives work as well as they do under the best of circumstances. Have a look at this fascinating iPod teardown video to see how the device was built around that drive.
Apple’s engineers built in multiple safety features to prevent the drives from destroying themselves when you decide to go for a jog. The most obvious being tiny shock mounts to cradle the drive, but the real innovation was aggressive caching of music to RAM, so that the drive could spin down as much as possible. This also incidentally helped with power consumption, so it was a win-win solution.
This was why skipping songs was usually instant, which was another benefit of babying a hard drive in a music player.
The tiny drives shaped everything about early iPods
Once Toshiba’s tiny drives were locked in as the key to the iPod the rest of the design basically flowed from that. Its size, thickness and shape were at least partially the result of the storage medium at its core. In a way, the iPod was basically the most beautifully-packaged hard drive in history, with a headphone jack. Even the famous click wheel needed to exist because of the immense capacity for thousands of songs. Imagine trying to scroll through all that with thousands of individual button clicks!
Flash memory eventually killed the miracle it enabled
As with all things hard drive, flash memory eventually caught up with and surpassed the tiny spinning disks in an iPod. Because flash memory is subject to Moore’s Law just like any other solid-state silicon chips, at some point the cost fell through the floor and capacities shot up significantly.
Like I said above, by the late 2000s I could pick up a multi-gigabyte no-name MP3 player at the bargain bin of any big store. That said, the 6th generation of iPod with a hard drive had 160GBs of space! Compare that to the 5GB model that shipped in the first generation, and it’s amazing what Apple and Toshiba achieved.
The first generation of flash-based iPod Mini only had 4GBs and the highest it ever went was 16GB. The iPod Touch—which is basically an iPhone without the phone part—topped out at a massive 256GB before Apple ended the whole idea of a standalone media player. The smartphone had replaced the need for one entirely.
Ironically, hard drives are still with us today and I’d like to think some of the innovation Toshiba put into its tiny drive has helped this storage medium advance. Today you can get hard drives in capacities that are simply uneconomical for flash memory, and there are dual-actuator HDDs that perform about as well as SATA SSDs for sequential read and write operations. The death of the hard drive has been averted, and I think they’ll remain relevant for the foreseeable future, just in new roles.
