Soon thereafter, the innovation floodgates opened. The "small form-factor" hard drive was invented in 1980 by Seagate. That 5-in. ST506 drive held the same capacity as the RAMAC (5MB) and could read or write more than 12 documents at a time in less than a second.

In 1983, the now-defunct company Rodime released the first 3.5-in. hard disk drive that held 10MB of data. Twenty years later, after buying IBM's disk drive division, Western Digital introduced its first 10,000-rpm Serial ATA (SATA) 3.5-in. drive, the Raptor. That drive, created for server use, had 37GB of capacity. The following year, in 2004, Toshiba came out with the first microdrive, a 0.85-in. square form factor that could store up to 2GB of data.

Microdrives spurred greater innovation in handheld devices, such as Apple's iconic iPod. When the iPod was first released in 2001, it had a 1.8-in. hard drive with 5GB of capacity. By 2006, the capacity of the iPod microdrive had grown to 160GB.

That was the year that Seagate and Western Digital introduced 2.5-in. hard drives for data center use with 10,000-rpm spindle speeds. Seagate's Savvio 10K.2 stored up to 146GB of data, or about 28,800 times that of the old RAMAC disk system, and was 8,500 times faster. Western Digital's Raptor X held 150GB. With the increased spindle speed, the drives could read or write the complete works of Shakespeare 15 times over in less than a second.

In 2006, Seagate also announced a 1-in. hard drive that held 12GB.