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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.
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.
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
So show me some statistics to support your contention that today's drives are less reliable. No, I don't want to know some third-hand story about your wife's friend's brother who said his hard drive failed. I want real, statistically significant numbers.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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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.
Ask a silly question..
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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!!!!
Here's my question.. SDRAM is cheap as it gets.
So why can't I have a couple gigs of that in my system instead of a paging file on the hard drive?
512 megs of primary system ram (DDR333) and 2 gigs of secondary (PC133/100/66). That'd be a huge performance boost over swapping to that ridiculous spinning piece of magnetic media.
Stick 2 gigs of it on a PCI card - present it to the system like a secondary IDE controller (like disk-on-chip), just configure OS of choice to use it.
?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!
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.
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.
*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
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
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 ----
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
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