I don't think any one person can create a piece of engineering as complex as a modern day hard drive. There are just too many disciplines involved: Physical, el

I don't think any one person can create a piece of engineering as complex as a modern day hard drive. There are just too many disciplines involved: Physical, electrical and embedded software engineering, applied physics, information theory for encoding the data and recovering from errors. But certainly a single person or group in those fields can be responsible for specific breakthroughs.