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Hard Drive Memory Lane
Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
Huh? What kind of comparison is that?
The capacity of harddrive has steadily improved over the years but the performance of harddrives has improved at an abysmally slow rate. Five years ago I would have not like to see the average desktop harddive at 7200 rpm with some into 10,000. I know better options are available, but those aren't in your average home computer either.
I've always wondered why these advances in hardware ALWAYS follow such a relatively linear trajectory. I mean, instead of releasing a hard drive 2x the size of last year, why can't they skip a generation and release one 10x the last year? What was stopping them 5 years ago releasing a drive of the size now on offer?
Seems almost like a conspiracy to have a continual flow of incrementally better product without going too far at once and leaving nowhere to go for upgrades. Because once they make the ultimate density hard drive there'll be only people replacing dead drives, and nobody upgrading.
" Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
That's nothing. Maxwell Smart could fit a phone in his shoe.
At that time, oil was going for $4.84 a megabyte.
First hard drive my emplopyer paid for was 5MB. First one I paid for with muy owm money was 40MB, and that was a trade-off for a whopping 4MB of RAM. If I'd gone with 1MB of RAM, I could have had a 110MB drive at the same price. At that time, RAM cost way more than drivespace, and that RAM let me multitask Quattro Pro and Paradox under DR DOS (I think you could actually do it with 2MB). Life was good!
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Drives increase about 1000 times in 10 years, for the same rough price, not counting inflation. For the price of a 500 gigabyte drive today, you'll be able to get a 500 terabyte drive in 2016. 10 years ago, you were buying 500 megabyte drives.
It still won't be enough to store all your holographic porn.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
"The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
ahh. well.... if you're *really* old school, you remember when a mobile phone was virtually the size of a storage closet.
(heck. That wasn't even that long ago, come to think of it....)
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
In the '80s I paid thousands for a 5MB hard drive that sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board (yes, these really existed, for RLL and ESDI and to and from SCSI too), and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.
;-)
I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Later I replaced it with a 5MB SyQuest removable drive (yes, there was a time when SyQuest made 5.0MB removable disks that were 5.25" to a side by about 1" high) that had a window on the front and weatherstripping on the door to keep the dust out. Unfortunately, all of those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!) and by the mid-'80s I was running my BBS on an ST-213 10MB half-height (what we'd now call "huge") MFM hard drive in a PC, having become fully commodified in my computing self.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Not wholly on topic, but this BBC article discusses the theoretical maximum speed of (modern) magnetic media.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3647055.stm
2.3 picoseconds is pretty quick, at least until someone makes a faster material.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Even today, I can store essentially all the music I've collected over the years that I really care about having at my fingertips all on my laptop, backed up on a handful of DVDs and my other machines if I'm paranoid about losing it.
I can store everything I've ever written and all the digital images I've ever taken or scanned on another handful of DVDs. A few dozen hours of my childhood were filmed in Super-8, and have been converted to a bookshelf's worth of VHS tape in the late 1980s (which are now collecting dust) and digitized again to a handful of DVDs which are geographically backed up among several family members. Recordings of my grandparents singing folk songs, maybe that's another DVD worth of MP3 data. My dad and mom have separately scanned virtually all of the family photos back to the late 1800s. I could easily back up all of this content on my laptop and still have room to store the TV shows that are downloaded for me automatically and then normally deleted after watching.
I'm not sure I will ever need more than a few terabytes. I'm not into holographic pr0n and I don't want a TV-quality recording of my life archived for posterity. Nobody is ever going to watch it. I can barely keep up with current reality as it is.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
A friend of mine took one of those really old 5.25" hard drives apart. The magnets were huge and amazingly powerful. He lost them when he held them about a foot apart in each hand, dropped them both, and they slammed together so hard that they shattered. True story.
I'm rather sure RAM still costs far more than drive space. In fact I'm sure the 1024meg (2x 512) of DDR400 RAM that I have cost more than my 200gig PATA 8meg cache hdd bought at the same time only what...A month and a half ago. Then again the gig of ram was worth putting off getting two 250gig drives so I guess life is still good!
I ate your fish.
>those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!)
In these days of cheap 100GB drives do people even remember 20MB drives with a label on them identifying the bad sectors when they were new out of the box? You wanted to open the boxes, so you could pick and choose (at retail). In IT, you got to open all of the units and put the best drives in your machine.
>sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board, and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.
And of course IBM had their own proprietary hard disk controller cards, a business model that lasted well into the (unlamented) PS/2 era.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I am not sure I want something spinning lethally fast either at eye level (tower on desktop) or in my lap. It's bad enough the family jewels are kept warm and toasty for several hours a day by conventional Lithium Ion electrical discharge while soaking up all that 802.11g radiation...
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Doubling every year is linear?
It's linear as in a first-order linear differential equation: dy/dt = k*y, whose solution is y = y(0)*e^(k*t).
SCSI hard drives seem to have peaked at around 142 Gb.
PATA around 400Gb
SATA around 500Gb
Why is it that no manufacturers (eg Seagate) seem willing to expand their SCSI product line at the same pace as others ?
Holy Crap! I wish I could give you a +1 Oldschool.
In fact, the magnets are the most useful things in junk hard drives - they can be used for all sorts of little jobs - but as hard drives get ever lighter and more efficient the magnets get ever less useful. Old SCSI drives are the best. A standard IBM 9Gbyte drive contains two magnets with a holding capacity which would cost over $50 from the hardware shop.
Pining for the fjords
It's worth pointing out that, at the time the first consumer hard drives shipped, phones weren't quite as advanced either. The smallest phones I knew about, for a long time, were the Princess models. But then Congress passed laws allowing you to plug anything you liked into a phone jack. (at one time, it was illegal to plug in anything that Ma Bell hadn't pre-approved, and they didn't seem to approve much of other companies muscling in on their handset business.) This resulted in a great deal of innovation in the phone market.
So in the mid to late 80s, when hard drives were getting popular in the consumer market, you could finally buy a phone that was small enough to fit in a pocket. This wasn't quite as popular as you might think, however, since a cord dangling out of your pants was deucedly uncomfortable.
</grandpa>
The first HDD I bought was as GVP Series II SCSI sidecar for my Amiga 500. It included a 120MB Maxtor drive, and cost £489 in early 1993. The last HDD I acquired was a 40GB drive that someone gave me after upgrading his TiVo. I currently have about 805GB worth of HDDs, most in active use.
Ram has worsened, relative to hard disks in the last 14 years. Thats because hard disks have improved about 105% each year in the megs per dollar figure but RAM has only improved about 70% each year. This has meant RAM has fallen way behind.
Figures come from my research available on my site:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/
i thought that part of AMDs focus was to provide a memory bus directly from the proc and aside from the northbridge, or am i misreading something somewhere
enlightenment please!?!
2^3 * 31 * 647
Is it just me, or does this seem like just a big Hitachi (IBM sold its HD business to Hitachi some time ago) product placement piece?
I guess we found out who BadAnalogyGuy is in real life.
I had a friend show me the contacts from the ignition of a Nissan his boss had had seviced at 90 odd thousand miles. They were worn to stubs. Absolutely mangled. The mechanic asked him when they were last changed.
"What do you mean changed? Its electronic."
My mate said it ran OK too right up to the moment they were changed.
OTOH I had a Datsun Violet that ate them. The engine on that sounded like a Swiss Watch. A real beauty. I think that was from the 70's too and it hardly touched the oil. And yes, I was aware that you were referring to crude.
BTW, the percentage of Arab crude that goes into engine oil is still about the same. So the ratio I used is still valid.
ahhh, buletin boards, them were the days, i remember scrounging a 9600 modem and giving it a go with the atari st, hunting down some shareware games, probably, in fact it's so long ago i'm not actually that sure about the details.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
The IBM system 305 was NOT the first hard drive. The first was in the Manchester Mark I of 1949, held a massive 81920 bits and was a drum rather than a disk. Five years before the IBM it was available in a commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I.
There has been simply HUGE SCSI hdds available years ago already exceeding current maximum sizes.
They just aren't off the shelf products, and you need to know where to look for them. I'm quite sure some manufacturer is selling way over 1Tb SCSI hdds.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Sounds like a new technology to improve hard drive performance.
Sata2 - Memory Lane mode
Why not make hard drives with two heads per platter, It seems trivial to make it work? Just place the heads at opposite sides of the drive, shrink the platter a bit to accommodate the two heads, and implement a abstracted queueing algorithm so the two heads can work together.
With SCSI's command queueing a dual head drive would at the very least double random read/write performance and access times. This would also make the drive sorta more fault tolerant because you only need one working head to read data off the drive.
I want a 15,000-RPM dual head Ultra320 hard drive!
Sometimes there was even one head per track (fixed in position) which improved performance by eliminating seek times.
There's a photo of drum storage about halfway down the following article (which I found more interesting and more informative than TFA): http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/brains/compu terage.html
Paid Q&A/Research
I remember seeing the first consumer 4GB drive by IBM listed in Computer Shopper for a whopping $20,000. Looking back, its amazing they didn't list the price as "Call".
A 9600 modem? You guys had it good! My first modem was 300 baud, which was almost exactly as fast as I could read. Then I upgraded to a 1200/75 modem, and realized that 75 was actually slower than I could type... Back in those days, it was illegal and a criminal offense to use a 2400 baud modem here in Sweden. It was also illegal to use phones bought abroad.
My first personal hard drive was a 40 meg full-height in my IBM PC.
Every once in a while I catch myself throwing 50 or 500 meg files around like they're nothing and think back to how many hard drives that is.
My favorite "making me feel old" machine is my Palm Zire 71. It's got more RAM (16m), more "disk" (1g SD card), a faster clock (144MHz), higher resolution (320x320x16-bit) than my first 5 computers combined. If I had a decent PC emulator for it, it'd emulate all of my first 5 computers too.
I remember back in the early 80s - I think around '83 - having a half-height (!) Winchester hard drive in my TI PC luggable computer. 10MB if I remember correctly, and if it wasn't for the fact that my father was working for TI at the time, I sincerely doubt we'd have had one. It was pretty great, but I have to admit that the best part of owning one was listening to that wonderful 15 second spin-up at boot time, easy to hear even over the fan howl.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I swear if I hear someone invoke Moore's Law one more time I'll shoot myself in the head. I study electrical engineering and half our seminars start with someone mentioning or explaining in detail, Moore's Law. Always with the damn chart too.
"Memory becomes more dense as time progresses, it's Moore's Law!"
"Wasn't Moore a genius to roughly predict the pace of the increasing density of memory? Wasn't he?"
"Have you heard about Moore's Law? It predicts the pace of memory density increase."
Ahhhhh!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Are you sure it was that bad? I remember benchmarking the floppy in my Amiga 1000 in 1985 at 20KB/s, or 1MB/50s. I realize that "in the '80s" includes 1980, and a lot changed between then and '85, but I still wouldn't think my floppy drive would have been twice as fast as your hard drive.
Of course, the Amiga's floppy was about roughly 70 times faster than that of the Commodore 64 it replaced (20KB/s versus 300B/s (!!!)), so anything's possible.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why couldn't you use a 2400 baud modem?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It was illegal because, well, it was not allowed by law... The same reason you couldn't plug anything you wanted into Ma Bell equipment in the US twenty plus years ago (according to another comment to this article). They had a monopoly and saw no particular reason to allow competitors to sell equipment. And they didn't sell 2400 baud modems becuase they sold other, more expensive technologies to businesses and saw no reason to compete internally. They did start selling 2400 baud modems in the late eighties, and the law against using non proprietary equipment was subsequently revoked, probably 15 years ago.
Any history, even a brief one should include these long lost drive makers:
Priam
Rodime
Conner
Micropolis
Wang
Data General
Miniscribe...
Clem.
I think that modern (I use that term LOOSELY) 3.5" floppies have a maximum tx rate of 32KB/sec. At least that's what all of the 1.44MB 3.5" floppies I have ever used have been.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Oh yeah, it was that slow. The machine was an old SSB machine and at the time you sort of had to get your own CPU and bus speeds working. It wasn't really overclocking, it was that the devices on your bus all had different characteristics or operating requirements and memory costs varied wildly depending on the speed of the chips you bought, so you often bought slow.
So depending on the rest of your kit, you might desolder the stock CPU clock generator/crystal and solder in a slightly slower or faster one. I think I had mine with a 2.8MHz crystal (divided into two, meaning ultimately a reasonably snappy 1.4MHz machine), and this was an 8-bit machine with an 8-bit bus that had shared address/data lines (they'd alternate across clock cycles), so the drive and controllers (in spite of having three controllers in series doing bus conversion) were really still much faster than the CPU, system bus, and memory, especially with the 48k of 400ns memory I had installed in the machine.
Hell, I could only do 1200 bps reliably on that system, which is one of the reasons I finally upgraded to a "new" PC in the mid-80s... I was seeking after that holy grail, 2400bps!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wow, that just brought back another memory... Each time you'd replace the clock generator, you had to do your timing loops--in the system block device manager, the system bus manager, etc. In essence, you'd have to get your drivers working with the new bus timings, otherwise they'd @#$(* up the data on your storage and wouldn't interact correctly (i.e. your serial port would be trying to talk to your 300bps modem at 308.4bps and such things and it just wouldn't work).
;-)
So you'd start up the OS patch tool that patched the OS *in memory* one byte at a time (like peeks and pokes in BASIC, almost). There was a big table of important bytes in the OS code that came with the operating system, so you'd do start the patch generator and tell it to change byte at memory location 4472 from 18 (ticks) to 20 (ticks) to set the timing delay and so on, through about six or seven different memory locations, each one a different timing loop. Then you'd cross your fingers and test all your devices to see if they worked without frying or corrupting anything. If not, it was back to the drawing board to try new sets of timing values. Sometimes when you tried to add a new device to the system bus (say, a serial port or some such), you'd spend all the rest of the day replacing the clock generator and then adjusting your timing loops, then trying to create a new operating system boot disk that incorporated those timing values instead of the old ones so that you could survive reboots.
Those were the days.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Sure, it would be nice if RAM was less expensive, but I think we've reached something of a plateau for RAM (enjoy it while it lasts). Modern computers run just fine with a measly 128MBs of RAM that costs $30. More is preferable, but hardly necessary like it used-to be, just a few short years ago. Perhaps that's partly a side-effect of faster hard drives making swaping less painful.
Besides, hard drives have gotten much larger and cheaper, but their performance hasn't improved nearly as significantly. That is the OPPOSITE of what I want from RAM. If I have to chose between twice as much RAM, or twice as fast RAM, I'm going for the latter.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
you can have all the fancy schmancy computer stuff to monitor your whole body and all that jazz... but I still want my personal jetpack which I've already been promised for years... and I don't care the size of the harddrive in it...
Storage drops. It always drops. We get it. http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/422/grochow ski.html
http://hermeticlogistics.blogspot.com/ How does this affect my financial future?
I mean, it's all on the internet anyways, just grab it as needed.
Like you would need more then 3 minutes anyways...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
3.5" diks has a circumfrence of 9.6 inches
so you have 1200 RPS times 9.6 inches or 11520 inches per second.
So the outer edge is very close to the sound barrier
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on