Pete Zaitcev's A Short History Of Removable Media Behind The Iron Curtain is a fascinating look into the history of (re)movable hard drives in the USSR. Apparently these were far more common there than they were in the west, to the point where it was routine to do this with what the west thought of as fixed hard drives. As a bonus it also includes some information on the early history of byte order independence in Linux filesystems, which Pete Zaitcev was there for.

(I know just enough about the history of computing behind the Iron Curtain to know that it was fairly different from the history in the west. My impression is that there was a fair amount of fascinating hacks and improvisations, and presumably some amount of really impressive original work.)