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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.
Leet, now I won't feel so bad knowning that my swap space is only worth a buck.
Trolling is a art,
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?
Bah! You kids with your newfangled hard drives! Why, in my day, we worked with ferro-magnetic drives. Sure, the magnets were big, and they were powerful, and dammit if you didn't get a nice buzz while working around these things. That was the way it was, AND we liked it!
AND I had to walk uphill! Twice! In the snow! Buzzed out of my mind!
/.'s 10 Millionth
And at the same time, our storage needs are 2^10 times as large due to 10^3 more data, 10^3 more illicit mp3's, 10^3 more pr0n, 10^3 more overhead in a microsoft binary document format, etc., etc., etc.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.
So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.
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
Did anyone actually go look at the drive listed? It's a 5400 rpm drive. My grandma can remember information faster than that.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks
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.
at MicroCenter, for about a month already. Other than that - yes, it is an important milestone. I'm still waiting for another one: Solid State Memory, Compact Flash format (as the least expensive) - 1GB for $100. Any takes when it happens? So far the best price I've been seeing (also at MicroCenter) is 512MB CF card for about $160 (after rebates).
I'm pretty sure that this is the second time this has happened. The first time it was the 80G drives for under $80. However, that was back when Pricewatch didn't include shipping in the price.
What's even more interesting is when the best $/byte drive changes to a higher capacity. Currently you pay a big premium for your storage if you go with something larger than 120GB. With the recent addition of 250G drives, it might not be long before 160G drives take over the best price per byte spot.
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
More and more we are seeing that dependability, reliability, and faster access times are paramount to overall storage capacity of hard disk drives.
Is a 100GB hard drive even worth $100.00 if it suddently stops spinning or the disk access arm breaks off after two years of use?
I do appreciate the storage capacities going higher as time progresses, but I do not appreciate the craftsmanship decreasing at such a rapid rate that warranties are now down to a year for your typical drive rather than 10 years as it should be.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Now, what to do with all my 120K to 60 gig hd's?
Personal Strap-On Aircraft for Auction on eBay Strap on?
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.
In 1986 I bought an "HD 20 SC" for my Mac Plus for $1,195.
God you young kids don't know how lucky you are to avoid the dark ages! :)
Bzzzt.
You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yeah, but by then, Super Windows XP Pro Ultimate Championship Edition will be out, will have backwards compatibility to all prior 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit architectures, take 8 solar days to load, require 800 terabytes to install, and the neuro-holographic interface will crash regularly, wiping out more data than a human being can process in a lifetime, and throwing people into neural shock. You'll die, but it will be illegal to have any negative feelings towards the occasion, because of the Digital Oblivion Mind-Control Act.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
Sometimes I scare myself...
--Dan
... Intel and AMD have finally smashed through that 1GHz barrier. Film at 11.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
That's great and all that they have disk space down to $1/GB, but what about some performance?
... but what are you going to get for that money ... probably a four banger ...
... but lets get real. If you have THAT much data, you're going to use the REAL thing.
...
This is like saying you can buy a new car for less than $10k
Now when they get SCSI drives into that lower price range, that will be something to celebrate!
Besides, who is really going to run a database that requires that much disk space (120 GB) on an IDE drive??? yes, I know you could use IDE RAID
Sorry to be the party pooper, but I think the "celebration" is a bit premature
Just my $0.02
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
For that old ST-238R . do you mean going into the only accessable bios on an XT by doing this in debug
.. the drives are huge and cheap .. and if only because our data needs are that much more.
.. if only because the MSIE cache is large but not the entire drive ..
.. I remember 5 years ago using Novell 4.1 where we gave people 10 megs of space and expected them to get by with it ..
g=c800:5
As previously said
If it gets to cheap than the market may very well dry up so that only OEMs get that cheap a price.
Think of it this way, if the drives at retail have so little markup as to be useless to even sell it.
Most people out there use the stock drives for they're machine
(and here I am with 290 gigs online with a desktop)
Wow, you remember when 1 MB == 1000 MB. Now *that's* magic!!
Attached was a note from the person who built the computer for them, saying something to the effect of "This is more storage space than you will ever need."
I imagine that at the time, 40 MB of storage was friggin' huge.
That's why the two 120GB drives in my server are mirrored. Nothing sucks more than having your main data drive fail.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I now have 10x the HD capacity that I can afford to back up (DLTs are still insanely expensive) and the access and transfer speeds haven't changed in years.
How about an 80 Gig drive that lasts 5 years and can transfer at about 1 Gig per second that costs $200. THAT I would buy.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Yes, it's great, isn't it? Even a cheapskate like me can afford a huge drive now. I vividly recall back when I was able to find a Miniscribe 3650, 40mb, for $400. Wow! Nowadays, anything less than 40gb isn't worth looking at.
:) Goddess, the fun of shopping for a controller card that could support a 1:1 interleave, and fine-tuning the system's skew factor to really max out performance. Even better, grab an RLL controller, and turn the 40mb into 60! Way cool :)
:)
We stuffed that 3650 in Igloo, running Microport Unix., and went to town
Ahh, the fun times back then
Lemon curry?
And just for people who don't know, PB = petabyte, and eb = exabyte.
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.
anyone else here remember RSTS/E?
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!
there are no cheap 120GB backup systems yet. I asked our IT guy at work what he said, "well, just buy another hard drive and back it up with that."
I dunno, I feel much better with tape. So, this begs a bigger issue: with the cost and corner cutting going into todays hard drives, how safe are your gobs of music and video files? And what do u do to keep that info safe?
ofcourse I meant to say that 1 terabyte = 1024 GIGABYTE yottabyte = 1 yottabyte = 1024 zettabytes = 1048576 exabytes = 1073741824 petabytes = 1099511627776 terabytes = 1125899906842624 gigabytes = 1152921504606846976 megabytes = 9223372036854775808 Megabits = 1180591620717411303424 kilobytes = 9444732965739290427392 Kilobits = 1208925819614629174706176 bytes = 2417851639229258349412352 nibbles = 9671406556917033397649408 bits me dumbass
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Actually, their usual price for 1 GB drives is a bit more than a dollar, but you can occasionally find one marked for $0.99 ...
Not really that silly. 1 GB drives are still useful. Actually, what would be really nice would be 10 GB drives for $10. Or even 10 GB notebook drives for $20On black Friday I bought a 30GB Maxtor for $29 (!) after rebate.
It wasn't all that long ago (early 90's) that hard drives were a still a dollar a megabyte.
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
The day after thanksgiving, A buncha friends and I stood in line for 3 hours at 4AM to each get an 80 Gigger for $50 (and they threw in an extra 256MB stick).
Best Buy Rules.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I have to say that single hdd for cheap is cool, but not as impressive in the price drop on arrays, etc. :) ]
I recently got a 10KRPM [10 drives] 40GB Rack mount ultra wide scsi 2 array with hot swap and a 32mb cache for $40. I thought this was an insane deal, this thing cost thousands new, but then I looked at ebay and it is more or less in the same price range as other similar systems - that, imho is the most impressive [except perhaps for the 0 frames dropped while recording video
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
and how do you propose backing up reliably 1 terrabyte of data ?, hard drives fail all the time, could you even contemplate losing your entire life's music collection or entire video collection cos the drive failed ? what about in years to come when you might have generations of your families data on disk
plus with all this reliance on magnetic based media is just an accident waiting to happen, you do realise that if one EMR pulse from the sun (or even a EMP weapon) ever reaches Earth were back to square 1, sure us as humans can survive the magnetic dose of energy but all our data/research is gone forever all cos we chose to store our knowledge on a magnet.
the saying "never put all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind
we really need to focus on developing a cheap non-magnetic based reliable storage medium instead of storing such massive amounts of data/work on such a fragile medium as a block of mechanically controlled magnetic iron.
paper at times has a lot going for it even today , do you think your hard drive or data will still be usable or around in 1000 years or even 50 for that matter ?
At $1/Gig, you can have 240 GB of speedy (45 MB/sec), death-resistant (mirrored) storage for $500. That should make any pr0n user, scientist, or geek happy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Computer Renaissance.
They offered an 8GB drive for $60 while Best Buy offered an 80GB drive for $79.95.
Renaissance my ass. More like the dark ages!
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I just recently bought myself a 6 120GB drive array, for $123 apiece. That's two months of divx :)
sic transit gloria mundi
Ask a silly question..
http://www.pcliquidators.com/
Look in the dollar bin, As-Is hard drives for a buck. Pulls from systems, not guaranteed. I snagged a handful of em on another order, and they worked fine for the purpose (booting a headless router setup). I got a 3.6 gigger that worked fine.
Of course, if you want a tested and error free pull, it's 20 bucks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB
/. article now so you can claim FIRST!
Moore's law: Doubles every 18 months.
MB to TB = 1024 times = 2^10
10x18 months = 15 years.
Of course you've got inflation to factor in... What's $100 today will probably be closer to $200-$300 then (though it will still feel like $100 does now). So that probably adds another 18 months or so.
So, $1/TB - should be on shelves just before 2020. Time to file that
Yes, I know Moore's law is technically about silicon. Yes, I know the predictions of doom. Equally, it seems to hold largely true for most aspects of computing and, for all a given tech hits its limits, a replacement tech always seems to turn up.
Actually, scan all of em. say at 50 megs each (thats what I do. That's 20 photos per gig, or 200 per 10 gig, or 2000 per 100 gig.....
Oh, btw, I took 3600 photographs in 1 month while working.
Thats Why. And thats not even talking redundant storage.
It is simple
1) Get 120 people together (I'd say 120 friends
2) Cut the drive platters into one gig portions
3) Take home 1 gig for a buck
(I'm being silly too)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.
:)
Best Buy had 7200 RPM 120 gig Maxtor drives for ~$100 just last month. Of course it was mis-priced, but I still got one while they were out there.
..and of course by then the warranty will be one month too.
Probably less tongue in cheek than I'd like that prediction to be.
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.
Which also costs $1/TB.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
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!
Before that it was floppies, before that I used a reliable old tape drive carefully marking the counters where each program started.
Lots of DVDRs!!!!!!
If your data means that much to you, BURN IT onto disk!!!!
My $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Many venders with lowest prices on PriceWatch, provide either bad or fraudulent service. Choose a reputable site with credentials (newegg.com) or your local retailer to get your prices and merchandise. The best place to check out a online business is various consumer review sites by typing in the company's name into Google (sample link to review of vender w/the $120 price on the HD). Pay particular attention to the most recent comments when reviewing a company.
You see, Vergon 6 was once filled with the super-dense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over ten thousand pounds.
They're not quite that cheap yet. And yes, I do go by there every now and then. Might even swing by there today.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
... happened not too long ago. I sold some old gear to my inlaws, who had been using my wife's computer from college (from just 2 years earlier). I had to swap out the hard drive from their old computer, a computer that was built in '97, so they could keep their old data. The strangest thing about it was that it had a 5 1/4"-wide hard drive! I thought the industry had standardized on 3 1/2" drives by that point (all the ones I bought during that time frame were 3 1/2".
To this day, that 5 1/4", 10 gig hard drive is still churning away, happily running Windows 98.
Seriously, I have a 30GB drive now, and I have NEVER gone over 10GB with WinXP and all the greatest and latest games installed. What need do I have for a 120GB drive? I dont, I would love to buy another drive for a simple Linux install, but no way am I going to use 120GB.. 10GB is far more than enough for it.. Where can I get a 10GB drive for 5 bux?
Does anybody know of anyone that actually needs these abr.'s???
If so, please post the link to their FTP site
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
It wasn't long ago that blank CDs cost that much, and many alternate backup mediums still cost a lot more than that. If you have a lot of data to backup, get yourself a swappable drive bay and a stack of drives. You've got a dirt cheap (and space-efficient!) terabyte of backups.
Neat.
Josh Woodward
...that's great - until you need to backup!
Why is it that storage seems to be so outpacing backup technology at the moment? Why, it seems that the cheapest reliable, efficiant backup at the momen is simply to duplicate the drive - buy two (or more!) of them..
Might not be as big a problem as you think. The RPM of the drive isn't much of a problem. I'd wager what a 120GB drive at 5400 is faster than a 20GB drive at 10k
TODO: Something witty here...
Does your city have a Goodwill computer center?
Mine does. A literal plethora of outdated and cheap junk.
I've never looked at the drive prices, but imagine they're pennies on the dollar.
Check here to get a listing of Goodwill stores (not specifically computer stores) in your zipcode.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
But you WILL be dealing with a mail-in rebate; in fact its quite likely that it will be a multiple mail-in rebate.
Also, you won't get as much buffering space for the ones that are on super sale.
But if you are diligent in sending out those rebate offers CompUsa can be a great place!
(and a thousand times better than those crappy OEM resellers like a-z computers! BLECH!)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I remember buying a 10MB 2 bay high MFM hard drive which cost $10 [Canadian], exactly 10 years ago. I got it to replace a 170MB drive that had just died, but my Dad later repaired.
I wonder if I can get 20 one GB drives for $20US. I'd buy those now. One drive that large though, just doesn't make sense to me. Why not just buy a DVD burner?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There's a bit of a price difference, as well :-) In about 1984, we'd paid about $35000 for four RM05 drives, which gave us 1GB of total drive capacity, and removable 250MB disk packs were about $1100. So that was $4/MB for the media, and $35/MB for the drives. I forget what tape drives cost, but 6250bpi 9-track tapes cost about $25 and held about 160MB of data, so they were the obvious backup medium.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Corn-fed middle-agers pretending they're old!!! Back in my day, we used mercury delay lines, and we LIKED it. Sure, the younger engineers and their tension-coiled torsional-wave nickel-wire delay lines, and their kids with their fancy ferro-magnetic cores and whirly, multiheaded drum memories stored more, but give me a long, vibrating trough full of toxic liquid metal any day.
Not to say it isn't a great leap for the /. crowd, I have about 90% utilization with 500 GB of storage at home. SHN and DIVX take up the bulk of my storage capacity. I know it sounds like "640k is enough for anybody," but the average desktop user does not need a 100 GB hard drive, even the casual P2P and multimedia user will not fill that up. Obviously 100GB will become a necessity with the 50GB minimum install of windows 2007.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
You know, it's been quite a while since I actually thought about this difference. Drives were much smaller then, so it wasn't so much. But now with the size drives we have today it really adds up. The difference between 2^30 and 10^9 is slightly more than 70MB. On a 200GB drive, you are talking about a 14GB difference. Thats as much space as I have in my current system (go ahead, laugh at me).
If manufacturers continue with this scheme, by the time we get to TB drives you will be getting almost 10% less than the stated capacity.
Good enough for digital audio workstations. mind you, your cache isn't going to be 8 megs like on the nicer drives.
But I'm talking about the CompUsa double mail-in rebate special. I know, cuz I got one and its serving on my home lan quite nicely. (actually, mine was 100gig, but it beat the $1 gig ratio)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I am getting a kick out of all these..
Back in my day i pay $1,000 for a 100MB hard drive
Oh yeah that's nothing my company paid $15,000 for two 20MB hard drives the size of a dishwasher.
That's nothing, I paid....
I guess it the next generations version of:
I walked 10 miles in the snow to school, both ways. And I was happy dang it!
What percentage of personal computer users use more than 10GB of hard drive space? Seriously.
If a person isn't determined to use their computer for a PVR, a digital video workstation, or an international citizen tracking database, it might be better to spend the money for a top-notch SCSI hard drive of about 30 to 40 GB.
$250 buys a 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra 320 hard drive with a 1,200,000 hour MTBF and a five-year warranty. The extra price buys: faster seek times, less latency, higher bandwidth, longer drive life, a manufacturer that stands behind their product...and better peace of mind.
Why should a person jump through technically-complex hoops, such as IDE RAID, just to be comfortable with cheap and unreliable hard drives? A single high-performance hard drive coupled with a recovery plan in the slight chance it breaks could be a better plan. My idea of a recovery plan is: a known configuration that can be remade from OEM CD-ROMs plus personal data backups (e.g., CD-RW).
Computer components are so damn cheap anymore, that the money we would have spent on just the basics years ago can now go towards quality and reliability.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Back when I had a DecMate II, I spent a fortune ($1120) for a whopping 4MB hard disk!!! I was convinced that that was all I WOULD EVERY NEED. 4 MILLION BYTES?!? That's like 32 MILLION ones and zeros! Who would every fill up THAT MUCH SPACE? It's INCONCIEVABLE!
Two years earlier, I was using a DecMate, which only had two 8" floppy drives (RX02, for you DECies out there). I remember being completely amazed that the operating system required the use of both drives. Then I sprung for an analog coupler to call into the mainframe. At 180 bps, I was travelling faster than God himself could go.
God am I old or what? Does anyone but me remember playing Moria on a VAX?
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
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.
This is a great deal of storage, so much that it is hard to comprehend. To put it into perspective, let's say that somebody wanted to keep a 1K byte file on every US citizen. You could store that online for under $500 at these rates.
I used to think it was lying to say a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, but then I realized that Giga was 10^9 long before digital computers existed. The computer industry (incorrectly) used the prefix Giga to mean 2^30. Giga properly and historically does mean 10^9 though. When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
I placed an order and they required me to fax a photocopy of my driver's license and credit card over because I was shipping to my work address with my personal credit card.
Two days later, they informed me that they lost that and asked me to fax again, then acknowledged that they had the fax.
A week and a half later, when I inquired about the order, they said that they suspected me of fraud for shipping to an address other than the billing one. After getting that all straightened out yet again, nothing happened for a week. I checked in again, and the order had been cancelled.
Since the order was closed according to their Yahoo shopping record, I purchased elsewhere, only to have the newegg.com order show up a week later. When I turned it around for a refund, they then tried to charge me a restocking fee!
Props to FW, but try finding a screaming deal now. I gotta wait 'til next week to score a 200G @ $1. Sad to say, but the best "hard work" scenereos right now only net about $.80/G after tax, and generally not in the size I want. I agree that any deal greater than $1/gig just hasn't been worth it for the last 2-3 months. Just the same, being able to say "I want this size, I want it now, I don't wanna fool with any stinkin' rebates, coupons or YMMV PMs," and being able to get it _is_ a milestone of sorts.
:-)
Nonetheless, my dream of a DVD server for the 200+ discs I have is still a small dot on my financial horizon.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It has certainly occurred to me. The problem is, where do I find drives (or parts in general) which cost twice as much, but last three times longer? Or 50% more, but last 75% longer?
The manufacturers seem compete ONLY on price, until you get into the unix workstation price range. It seems we have the choice of kmart specials or gold-plated and priced to match.
Since I can still back up each single project on a single CD (actually, all of my projects, and /etc, and my ~/.files on a single CD), is it really worth my while to spend anything extra to increase the odds of that HD lasting that long from 90% to 99.9%? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the manufacturers compete only on price: quality suffices for most use, and RAID covers the few folks who need better quality on a PC.
A another thought is that I'll be wanting to replace my 30GB hard drive in another two years or so. It will have lasted about 4 to 5 years when it's replaced, and odds are that it will last that long.
My data and what-have-you seems to expand fast enough that I don't really need hard drives or computer hardware in general to last a full decade. I do still have a 10 year old laptop, but it's a toy today. It doesn't have an ethernet port, nor a modern modem, and no way to add either, so I can't even use it as a cheap router or xterm.
I suspect that if there was money to be made by making PC hardware that was significantly more reliable than the current standard, we'd see soemone filling that niche. The fact that none of the intensely competitive hard drive manufacturers are trying to fill that niche by selling specially inspected versions of their drives with extra warrenties suggests to me that we just don't want extra reliability enough to pay for it.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the hard drive manufacturers ARE making those specially inspected, high-reliability, long warrenty versions. They put SCSI interfaces on them to mark them as better than consumer grade, and sell them for the 50% to 100% extra that the extra quality control costs. That matches up pretty well with the stories I hear about the relative quality and price of SCSI versus IDE.
See what I've been reading.
I've met a guy on IRC who did this about a year and a half ago with SCSI RAID. An interesting side note: he recorded the noise it makes it on startup and just those disks spinning up makes it sound like a jet engine.
The drives have been $1/gig with mail-in-rebates for some time now. (big stores, BestBuy / Frys ..etc).
But I loath MIRs!
May it is just me, but I could never get any rebates. It is some sort of 'missing proof of purchase'. Even though I stuffed every thing from the store receipt to those damn stickers in one envelope and mailed it.
So I felt like I was ripped-off and never tried mail-in-rebates since then. I always thought they were some sort of scam. They rely on you
- not mailing in the rebates (how many geeks do?)
- or able to refuse rebate because a sticker is slightly damaged!
Finally it is good news, that you can get a $1/gig without those MIRs..
nice.
LinuxLover
Wait, the OS that *can't* play Quake 82 will be considered the "toy OS"? Huh?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
*Risks the wrath of the moderators by going off topic to release a bee from a bonnet*
:)
Finally! Someone else notices the problem!
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable.
So, who is behind it? Is it the manufacturers of the floppy drives, or the manufacturers of the floppy disks? Have Iomega secretly bought out every single one of the floppy disk manufacturers?
Oh well, it gives an opportunity for even young people to state 'They don't make them like they used to'
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '
- found on a park bench
When I was a kid, one day my father took me by the office on Saturday because he had to do something. I don't know how much data was in the hard drive, but it was the size of a refrigerator. You had to wait a few minutes after turning it on so the disk could "spin up" and you were supposed to watch it after you turned it off to make sure it "spun down" properly. Either there was a lot of angular momentim in there, or the motor was really weak. All the computer equipment was Wang. They used to joke about "playing with the Wang". Ahhh... the days before sexual harassment suits.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
When Radio Shack first released the Model 16 (one of the first 'mass-market' Unix (Zenix) boxes), their 8MB hard disk (with a 10" platter) cost something like $6000. That's why I got hired by one person who wanted to know if I could get a usable system to boot with two 1M (8") floppy disks instead of a hard disk.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Falling prices is always a nice thing for consumers, but look out - quality is suffering, and companies like Maxtor have been accused of "stuffing the channel" to move more product.
These low prices are a result of cut-throat competition akin to that in the "0% financing" car industry -- the manufacturers aren't profiting, so there won't be very good support down the line. Look at IBM - they sold their (previously crappy) hard drive line to Hitachi. Additionally, virtually all of the IDE/ATA drive manufacturers have cut their warranties to 1 year OR LESS!
I personally had an 80 GB IBM deskstar die in December (3 months after manufacture). It cost just over $3,000 to get the thing recovered by a data recovery shop (the thing wouldn't power up, so no, Norton Utilities was not an option).
HOWEVER - now that big drives are so cheap, look for (and implement if you can afford it) IDE RAID-1 configurations (mirroring) to save money and increase reliability.
Yet tape drives are still around $30/GB! Who cares about big monster drives if you can't backup the data.
Hard drives still fail, you know.
-ted
Locate an IDE RAID controller. Slap for of them in (on separate channels), and load the controller with, say, 128 MB of cache. Enjoy.
funny munging
Flash memory is very slow. Much slower than hard drives, but faster than EEPROM. Magnetic ram, due to appear in '06 or so, will be nonvolatile and at least as fast as dram.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Pricewatch is nice, but next to useless without or similar methods of checking out resellers.
Always remember to check out anyone offering the "best" prices, especially their history with returns.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah, I think I was thinking of Lost in Space, which is about where I am today.
The pain, the pain!
Rebates mostly suck, but not always.
Example: I just bought some software for $200 at staples. There was a $50 off $200 coupon, so I only spent $150. I have 2 rebates totaling $190. So in the 8-10 weeks when I get the rebates, I will profit $40 on my initial $150. Thats a 26% return on the money in 2.5 months, plus I get the software to boot.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
You know that sorting algorithms won't get better than O(NlgN) and searching algorithms won't get any better than O(lgN).
And access times of HDs haven't improved much in the last 10 years (bulk transfer has, though).
I know CPU's are now much faster... but also software developers became sloppier (think of the first C compiler running in a 4Kbyte RAM machine).
So... what all this means?
Probably we'll just have to wait longer...
I know... maybe I'm worring too much...
When I started high school, they got the first student-usable computer in Texas. It was three feet tall, two feet wide and deep, had 256 BYTES of volatile memory, and had a paper-tape storage device.
Yes, paper. Inch-wide paper tape, in folds, with a punch write head and an optical reader. You programmed the machine with eight switches and a push button (up, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, ENTER).
Just six years later, a friend of mine had an Apple II with 64K of RAM (the "language card"), color display, and *two* 5 1/4 floppy drives. Other Comp Sci students used to come over just to see this monster machine, which was being used to write some silly little computer game called "Ultima."
Seriously though, the reliability of these cheap high capacity drives suck.
The recent reduction in warranty length should have proven that to most anyone.
Where are the smaller, and more reliable ones, being sold for these costs?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Where I'm at, they'd get laughed at for asking that much for such a dinosaur of a computer.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
I don't need a 120G drive, 20G is plenty-- so when can I buy one for $20?... -- Kazoo
Got a Micro-Center near you? Check here
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
And no, I'm not going to regale you with tales of having to walk to school 22 miles in the snow, uphill both ways. I only had to walk about 1.5 miles, and it was fairly flat, though there was in fact snow.
Really
Expensive
Array of
Disks
OK, there's some debate as to when this point actually was, but whatever- close enough. I submitted this story because I just wanted it acknowledged that it has actually happened- I don't think it matters much if its off by a few weeks.
$1/GB. Wow.
Thanks for the support (and the couple other people who said the same thing) :) I think the problem is that some idiot gets mod points and he's DYING to use them, so he picks on someone making a "negative" comment ... Although I was trying to be funny and make a serious point. Maybe I wasn't funny enough ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Right near me is a store called second source, where you can sometimes find neat stuff and get good deals.
Sadly, they sell hard drives for 5 cents/megabyte, flat rate. A 120 gig drive there would be six grand. They don't sell drives that large, though, they only sell drives in the 10MB-1G range (I shop eBay for my older drives, now...)
Now if IDE drives are so cheap, when we will see cheap SCSI drives like this? The only extra stuff is more complex circuitry (which is debatable, since IDE drive controllers are getting quite complex these days). Although vendors want to displace SCSI with USB (slow), USB 2.0 (still not quite as good as SCSI), and FireWire (approaching SCSI in some respects, surpassing it in others, maybe someone could make loads of $$ off of a FireWire/SCSI translator?)
I've used IDE/SCSI translators (the ones by Acard are fantastic), but they aren't too scalable and sometimes give funky SCSI errors on my IRIX machine (although I think that was a shorting problem, as I've insulated everything better now and I haven't seen the same errors in months).
Well, at any rate, if IDE only supported more than two devices per bus, my fileserver could use an upgrade. Guess I'll be buying a many-port IDE card sometime soon... or maybe I should look into small hardware RAID systems? Software RAID can be tricky to set up, slower, etc etc.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
The thing is, I doubt anyone needs non-volatile memory that much :) I reboot to fix things more often than to change the OS (more so in Windows, but in Linux as well).
You kids these days don't understand how easy you have it. Why, back in MY days...
I remember my first computer job at a Radio Shack computer center. Some guy had been begging his wife for months to let him buy a hard drive, and she finally let him. I think it was Christmas or something. It was $2,800 (US) and was the size of a mini-tower case laid down flat. I can't remember whether it was a 5 MB or a 10 MB drive.
This would have been... let me think... must 'a been the winter of '84/85... yep, them were the good old days, when floppies were 5 1/4 inches and women were grateful, or something like that.
And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
You mean the folks with camcorders and kids and scrapbooks and home movies and DVD players?
:)
The ones who will film the baby's first step, or the violin recitals, or the choir performance on Christmas?
Who will make videos out of trips to the Bahamas, when they go skiing in Colorado, and visit the temples of Japan?
Who will then make 10 DVD-Rs of each of these events and spread them, like spam, to their next of kin?
And then put up accompanying photo albums online, with short writeups, and then send them via email, like spam, to their co-workers, best friends, and family?
Apple is betting on this market, at least
GPL Deconstructed
Cool. That is it. The big black band is the drive crash.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I once used KDE1 on a 32MB system, and it run quite smoothly. One day I did some configuration and forgot to turn on swap. After typing startx, the system nearly thrashed to death, and it took me three minutes to exit KDE normally.
Sure, people have those stories - but it seems to be the result of ignorant store employees who don't understand the rules/policies of the store.
I know Office Depot, Best Buy, and most other chain stores are supposed to only price-match prices offered by other retail outlets. Internet-based advertisements and mail order deals don't count.
(I've tried several times, and never met with any success.)
And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!
Was that before or after you clipped it onto the phone and manually dialed the number?
Under their "Worst Models Ever" I found a list of drives, almost all of which are old and long out of production. So, while drive failures still plague us, it doesn not appear to me that today's drives are less failure-prone than older drives.
I am the statistic.
Sorry for being blunt, but I don't think you really understand statistics.
I used to work in a data center doing sys admin work and we had about 30 IMB hard drives ranging from 30-60 GBs.{snip} but in the end about 75% failed.
(I assume that you mean IBM.) So you had 30 drives from one manufacturer with a high failure rate and you feel that this is evidence that hard drives throughout the industry are less reliable than they used to be? Both IBM and Fujitsu have produced drive lines with defective components that have caused high failure rates. It's a product defect, not an industry trend. That's like citing Firestone tires on Ford Explorers as proof that tires are less reliable than they were back in the sixties.
That's two-channel audio. You are going to get many more channels (in fact, DVD audio already does, I believe).
Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.
Sure it is: DVD resolution is really low. You are first going to see HDTV-resolution DVDs, and later probably 3-6 MPixel video. Beyond that, there will be many simultaneous video streams: half a dozen camera angles from a live event, etc.
I have several IDE WD's ranging from 20Gb to 100Gb and all undergo nasty stress (constant reading and writing.. and they are FULL) and they have so far held up very well. I've had a couple crap out on me but they were all 5-10 years old. The worst drive I ever bought was a cheap IBM drive and it and every replacement they sent just blackholed within a day or so but they recalled that line so maybe it was just one of those things. I've had a couple Maxtor and Samsung drives over the years and they were okay but didn't take the abuse the WD's did but for these prices I'm willing to give em another go. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yes, but will I be able to purchase a hard drive for $1? What ticks me off about hearing that hard drives are "down to" 1$/GB is that I can't just go to the store and spend $20 + tax to get a 20GB hard drive. Right now I'm running on 6GB and just about any hard drive over that amount is out of my price range.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I don't think they want us having the freedom that would offer, so commercial audio is unikely in that form.
For hobby, occasional "Ministry" package then yeah, damn good idea.