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hbarkatoday at 4:05 PM0 repliesview on HN

That video is a perfect description. Hard disk drives are incredible machines, going through many steps to produce the platter. The flying head is also fascinating. To this day I have full working hard drives over over twenty years old, while my SSDs have gone kaput.

The Bay Area used to be the center of these companies’ manufacturing and I was there when they literally unbolted the Varian sputter machines from my company to ship to Malaysia. The likes of Seagate, Western Digital, Conner, Quantum, Maxtor, Micropolis, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Read-Rite. Also Iomega in Utah. They were all here. They all left practically overnight. They were executive decisions. It was a shocking move and the whole history would make a good documentary or movie.