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Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte
Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.
Disreputable dealers have had 120GB for $110 for months now. FP, btw.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year. For years, hard disk drives were confined to mainframe and minicomputer installations. Vast "disk farms" of giant 14- and 8-inch drives costing tens of thousands of dollars each whirred away in the air conditioned isolation of corporate data centers.
$120 for 120GB. That's lovely, but what about reliability? Where did that go?
Bought an Atari SH204 20meg hard drive for my beloved 520ST, $985.
Inside was the circuitry to make the atari interface speak MFM/RLL, and a full height 5.25" Rodime 20meg hard drive. 65ms seek time.
If I've done my math right, that's $50,432 per gig.
Wow, this is amazing if you've been around for a while.
My first hard drive was 105MB (that's mega, not giga) and cost $600. Of course, that included the SCSI interface for the Atari ST I was hooking it to.
The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
Well yes, the prices have dropped immensly indeed - however it might be worth considering that the basic concept of physical storage has not changed a bit. We are able to squeeze more bits into each square millimeter, but access speed has maybe changed by a factor of 50 or so (I'm guessing here, so please correct me). At the same time, processor speeds have aptly doubled in speed every 18 months or so.
I do appreciate cheap mass storage on my desktop, don't get me wrong, but I really long for things like static memory or holographic storage devices. And the use of spinning copper disks is not exactly power efficient either - so on the laptop front, new storage technologies could make a big difference.
Attention: Please Stand Up, Power Computer Down and Walk Away. Thank You.
Even if you ripped DVD's into VOB's ... you'd still need to rip over 100 to justify even 1 TB, and who the hell rips to just vob, that's like ripping to wav with a CD, you just don't do it.
Even with 4.7 gig DVD Burners, the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space (like a TiVO that can record 100 channels at the same time??)
Lets face it, the mp3 and other multimedia files has justified multi gig harddrives. Plus games that take up 600 megs a pop aren't exactly hurting the old cause. There's going to need to be justification for multi TB drives if they ever want to sell, well ... duh :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Damn! I remember when they were $250 a MB, course this was when a MB was 1024KB and not 1000MB. Ah, the magic of marketing!
The first hard drive I bought cost me $500.
It was a 10 MByte (yes, that's mega) Seagate. Full height 5 1/4 (hint, a CD drive is half height).
I partitioned it into 4 drives:
C: 1M - DOS (V 2.0 !)
D: 4M - Applications
E: 4M - Data
F: 1M - Testing
Mind you after struggling with two 5 1/4 floppy drives, this was heaven.
I still have it, after all, where could I possibly sell it?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Retail stores are a very good place for HD's. You will often find BestBuy/CompUSA/Staples/CircuitCity/OfficeMax etc will have lower prices on HD's then what is at pricewatch, local computer stores, and even regional computer expos. More then likely you get a retail drive in a box with full warranty (mainly 1 year now) and maybe even a UDMA cable and 5.25 adapters. Most mail ordered I've seen are OEM and 30 days at best. CDRW's are the same way.
Sometimes you may have to deal with a rebate to get the good deal but at least one of the above retailers has one good deal a week. Not sure if SalesCircular covers all areas of the US but it is a good place to scope out retailers sale prices for a week.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
This would be even better news if it related to the smaller hard drives. I would love to be able to spend $10 for a 10 gig drive, or $40 for a 40 gig drive.
I have no use for super huge drives, but super cheap drives would always come in handy.
Since everyone else is giving away their age by telling how big their first drive was and how much it cost, so will I. I'll never forget it...
10MB Techmar with a serial interface - $2000. This was ~1984 and I was damn glad to have it!
Drives I own made from 1992-1997: 6
Number of those that went bad: 2
Drives I own made from 1998-2002: 4 Number of those that went bad: 2*
* - a 3rd developed a chunk of bad sectors but still works fine
Would you pay twice as much for the same capacity? If so, then get two, big, cheap drives, and use mirroring RAID. You get much faster data rates, and you have backups.
Best of both worlds...
-twb
That's something I've learned about PC hardware. You must plan for failure. That's what RAID and backups are for. I've been buying harddrives for $1/GB for over a year now. I buy the cheapest drives I can find, 80GB Seagates, and use a few 100-200GB drives to build a RAID. The Seagates work well in swapable drive bays and have been very stable. I had one problem and it was only a missing pin, no data loss or corruption. But then again none of the data I store of them is important by itself.
The best technology today IMO is a few cheap 1394 controllers, some 1394->IDE converters and the cheapest $/GB drives you can find. Build a RAID, probably in a custom case with like 8 or 12 5.25" drive bays, use swapable IDE enclosures and have the box email you when the logs show a drive is about to fail. It might cost a little initially but it is mostly fault tolerant and dirt cheap in the long run.
if you could pick up a 40GB drive for $40, or a 20GB for $20, without having to fool with rebates. As it is, the cost of hard drives seems to be staying at around $100, almost regardless of capacity, limiting you in just how cheap a system you can build. Right now the most expensive item in a bottom feeder system is the HD. On Newegg you can build a minimal Duron system for:
20GB HD: $69
All-in-one mobo: $51
CPU: $31
Case: $28
128MB SDRAM: $22
CD-ROM: $19
Floppy: $8
Total: $228
If that 20GB drive were $20 instead, that would be only $179. Of course, there are reasons why the drive isn't $20, I'm just lamenting.
In this paper, dates were predicted for a megabyte per buck, a gigabyte per buck, and a terabyte per buck. I recall that this 1980 paper predicted a gigabyte per buck in 1999; pretty close!
Jonathan V. Post, "Quintillabit: Parameters of a Hyperlarge Database", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Very Large Databases,
Montreal, Canada, 1-3 October 1980
By the way, Post named in this article the "Shannon" = 1 mole of bits = 6.02 x 10^23 bits.
Now THAT's a big memory!
Except you don't find $1/GB on SCSI.. especially not SCA if you plan to hot-swap. I suspect it would be much cheaper to obtain Firewire->IDE adapters which would allow you to hot-swap.
Of course, Firewire1 isn't fast enough.. you would have to go with Firewire2 for any reasonable ammount of speed. 400Mbps
120GB * 9 = 1080GB (120GB drives are cheapest)
$170 * 9 = $1530 ($170 for a 120GB drive and firewire2 enclosure)
Each Firewire2 bus can do 800Mbps, which is 100MBps.. you would want each drive doing at least 50Mbps, requiring 5 Firewire2 controllers (and associated costs) in your machine... assuming you can FIND Firewire2 controllers (I haven't been able to, other than what is builtin to the new Apple machines). You could go with slower speeds for less money, your choice.
Of course, as the original poster said.. you can just use IDE.
When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
Actually he said "Jiggawatts", quite funny now that we use giga all the time, but back in the mid 80's I guess giga- was used as much as exa- is now.
Hmm, cable connecter was about 1 foot long. At 88mph, total maximum contact time (Assuming the car didnt vanish half way through the connection - if it did less power was needed) was less then 1/100th of a second. Total power used by the car was therefore 1.21*10^9/10^2 - 12.1MJ. (1 watt is a measure of power, not energy - 1 joule per second)
With a massive capacitor you could charge the delorian off five ten-millionths of a gram of antimatter (combined with an equal ammount of matter). More importantly you could charge the delorian in a UK power socket (13A, 240V, or just over 3.1KJ/s) in less then 7 minutes.
The delorian must have needed the power all at once (understandable), and didnt have any way of storing that much charge (doubtful).
BTW 1.21GW is a lot of power to continuosly put out.
Marty was back in 1955 for a week. Even a trickle charge of 60W (1 light bulb) for the entire week would have provided 36MJ, enought to power the delorian for 1/30th of a second - 3 times longer than needed.
Incidently, in 1999, the U.S.A produced over 13 million TerraJoules in electricty - enough to power the delorian for over 300 years.
Maybe so, but only for CD quality audio. What about when 96 khz, 24-bit becomes the standard? Or even more? I'm not one of those wackos that claims to hear the difference between this a CD quality, but it is useful in some applications, especially sound editing and processing. I forget what specs SACD and DVD Audio use, but they're already more than CD quality.
Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.
Ha! What about fully uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) video? At DVD resolution, that's about 13 gigs per hour. What about HDTV resolution? That's well over 70 gigs per hour uncompressed. What about higher resolutions? What about higher color fidelity (48 bpp instead of 24)?
Man, I'm glad the world isn't completely full of self-limiting thinkers like you. You sound like that famous quote (whoever said it, Bill Gates, or not): "Nobody will ever need more than 640k." If the world only had people like you, we'd still be in the dark ages!
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jrm21/images/platter- lowres.jpg
I put a US one dollar bill on the display case for size comparison ;)
There is also a clipping from a newspaper of the time saying how Stanford was suing over warranty issues (such has high unavailability) but it doesn't say what the outcome was...
While a DVD may only be on the order of gigabytes, the raw video used to make that DVD is going to be on the order of hundreds of gigabytes, and what with Apple's push for iLife (iMovie3, iDVD3), I don't think there's any problems at all with sucking up 200gb in making a home movie masterpiece.
Now imagine when Apple releases the home consumer version of Shake (for compositing and SFX) or Logic Audio (for home music composing), and it's easy to imagine the need for more storage. The movies you make, the raw footage, the intermediate files, etc.
GPL Deconstructed
True. If you look at older discs (1990s era) the two halves of plastic are glued all the way around. The 'new' floppies are only glued in the corners so lint, grease, etc can get in and wreck them more easily.