Disk / Storage Timeline

First cut at timeline of significant events in Disk and Storage, ignoring "historical" devices like floppies and bubble memory. Edward Grochowski's 2012 "Flash Memory Summit" talk tracks multiple storage capacity, price & technology from 1990.

First commercial computers were built  in 1950 and 1951: LEO[UK], Zuse[DE] and UNIVAC[US].
LEO claim the first working Application in 1951.
 [1949: BINAC built by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation for Northrup]

Ignored technologies include:
Tapes: used in the first computers as large, cheap linear access storage.
Drums: in use a little later and continued for some time, often in specialist roles (paging).

	Disk / Storage Timeline
1956	IBM 305/350 RAMAC, Disk. [Volumes, DASD, extents, Partition Datasets, CHS-addressing, count-key-data structure - variable-length blocks ]
1964	IBM OS/360 "Partition Datasets", count-key-data disks, IBM-DOS et al: Datasets and ISAM
1969	Unix V5?. PDP-7/11, hierarchical file system, inodes + "setuid" bit (patented).
1974	UNIX V6, CACM. 512by sectors, RK-05 [2.5MB + 36.5MB tape (2400', 1600bpi)
	tools: ar, tar, dump, restore
	PDP-11.hierarchical fsys, single-root + mount, pipes, setuid, dirs, inodes, hard links, {owner, groups, permissions}, times.
	read(), write(), seek(), stat(), open(), close(), creat(), unlink(), link()
1974	HSM by IBM. Tape Cartridges. IBM 3850 Mass Storage Facility. 6250bpi?
1974	CP/M, Kidall, Digital Research. File System with "A:" volumes.
1976	PWB, Programmers Workbench. SCCS - Version Control, RJE (Remote Job Entry), shell, troff -mm, make, {find, xargs, cpio, expr, egrep}, yacc, lex.
1979	IBM “Fixed-block Architecture” 3370, 512by sectors
1980	FAT-12, vols 32MB/512by, 256MB/4K sectors
1981	ACID for DB’s. Jim Gray, “Transaction Concept: Virtues & Limitations”
1982	RCS (Revision Control System), BSD
1983	4.2BSD, symlinks [1978: DEC and RDOS]
1983	MBR boot, partitions
1983	Reuter & Haerder, coined 'ACID': "Principles of transaction-oriented database recovery”
1983	Tolerant Systems [later Veritas]. check-pointing Apps, Journaling FileSys +N-plex (RAID 1, N-vol)
1983	‘locate/updatedb’ utility for Unix. DB of all files on system.
1984	FAT-16, vols 2GB vol, 4GB with Large File Support
1984	NFS, Sun.
1984	compress (LZW)
1985	High Sierra (CD-ROM), ECMA
1986	CVS (Concurrent Version Sys) in shell
1986	Filesystem Switch, System VR3
1986	RFS - System VR3.
1986	IDE/ATA Logical Block Addrs, lba-22 [lba-28, 1996, all drives. max 128GiB/137GB] lba-48 current. 128PiB. FileSys/inode functionality
1988	ISO 9660 (CD-ROM)
1988	Tivoli Storage Mgr, TSM. HSM with GPFS.
1989	Lotus Notes. DB/file replication.
1989	RAID: Rethinking Single Large Expensive Drives. IBM 3390, last of this line: 1989-1993
1989	Veritas, VxVM, LVM? AT&T, SUN, AIX, HP-UX.
1989	PKzip. 1st ".zip” archival & compression format
1990	ACL papers, MITRE Corp.
1990	CVS (Concurrent Version Sys) in 'C'
1990	EMC Symmetrix 4200 integrated cached disk array, 24Gb. RAID-0, striped.
1991	Plan 9, Overlay Mounts, isolated user views, fossil (dedupe), cached storage
1991	Veritas File System, VxFS. JFS on HP-UX1992 - RBAC paper. Ferraiolo & Kuha, Mandatory & Discretionary Access Controls.
1992	WAFL, NetApp
1993	MOSIX distributed O/S. SSI?
1993	NetApp Snapshots, RAID-4 (single parity, WAFL) 1st filer shipped.. NAS: NFS, SMB
1993	Trusted Solaris (B1), ACL's
1993	ext2, 32TB
1994	IBM patent on RBAC
1994	MS-DOS 6.22 DoubleSpace [1991 1st vrs]
1994	RockRidge, Joleiet (CR-ROM)
1994	StorTech Iceberg: RAID + Thin Provisioning/Over-Allocation
1994	XFS, SGI, 8EB
1995	ATA/IDE interface on all new consumer disks
1995	Beowulf clusters
1996	FAT-32, 2TB / 16TB
1996	Garth Gibson paper, Object Stores [successor to RAID]
1996	NDMP: Network Data Management Protocol, NetApp, Legato. direct backup of Datastores.
1996	Solaris MC: Single System Image, SSI
1996	rsync - FOSS replication
1997	1Gbps FCAL. SAN’s begin.
1997	RBAC DB products
1998	HFS+, Apple
1998	Unixware Cluster: Single System Image
1999	1Gbps Ethernet. IEEE 802.3ab, twisted-pair
1999	ISO-9660 (CD-ROM)
1999	Intel EFI 0.9. GUID Partition Table: GPT
1999	Linuxcare Bootable Business Card: cloop - compressed ISO [Knoppix] avg 2.5:1 ratio, 64Kb pages
1999	VAX Multipathing [OpenVMS]
1999	ext3, 32TB
2000	Subversion (client-server version control)
2002	10Gbps Ethernet Fibre. 802.3ae
2002	ATA-6 spec: LBA-48 and CHS obsolete
2002	FAT-X
2003	Power over Ethernet. 802.3af
2003	VMware: vMotion, live image migration
2004	Data Domain: Purpose-built backup appliances, PBBA. 1.25TB. 50:1 compression, Data DeDupe
2004	Panasas ships 1st Object Store Product
2004	ZFS, 256ZB
2004	Lustre 1.2.0,March 2004, Linux kernel 2.6
2005	UEFI boot + GPT. OS/X 10.4.0 ‘Tiger’ on Intel,
2005	Full text search, consumer desktop. “Spotlight”, OS/X 10.4
2005	exFAT, 512TB
2005	Git - distributed version control
2005	Mercurial - distributed version control
2006	ext4, 1EB
2007	Brtfs, Oracle
2007	Fusion-io PCI Flash demonstrated
2008	Flash ‘TRIM’ command defined. ACS-2 command set.
2008	VMware: Storage vMotion, Local Datastores to/from SAN/shared datastores
2009	Advanced Format: 4096by sectors, hard disk
2009	SquashFS, 2.6.29 kernel. max 1Mb pages
2009	Spotlight full-text search, iOS 3.0
2010	40&100Gbps Ethernet. 802.3ba. Fibre mostly.
2011	PureStorage: Flash Array, 1st data centre all-flash device
2012	VMware: Storage vMotion, Local Datastores to/from local datastores
2014	Seagate Kinetic drive, ethernet [2x 1Gbps SGMI ethernet], 1Kb Keys, 1Mb Objects
2014/5	WD/HGST Open Ethernet Drive Architecture
2015	Seagate release SMR (Shingled) drives. Market seems underwhelmed.
2016	Samsung release 16TB SSD in 2.5", smaller, faster, less power-hungry than HDD's. x8 GB/Rack Unit