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."

Comments

Stupid Comparisons

[Chmarr]

From the article:

The going rate was $7.81 a megabyte, 38 percent more than the price of oil at the time.

Huh? What kind of comparison is that?

Re:Stupid Comparisons

[Neil Blender]

From the article:

        The going rate was $7.81 a megabyte, 38 percent more than the price of oil at the time.

Huh? What kind of comparison is that?

It's a stupid comparison but if they added 'a barrel' in there it might add a little perspective. Oil was going for about $4/barrel in 1973. Consider now the cost of a barrel of oil gets you 140 gigs of storage. Oil is roughly 20 times more expensive today but efficiency has probably only increased by about a few fold at best. Today's storage dollar goes many, many thousands of times farther than today's oil dollar, as compared to 1973.

depends on how you measure improvements

[GenKreton]

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.

Re:Why oh why???

[evilviper]

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?

Because we don't yet have the manufacturing technology to place each individual electron on a platter, heads that can read and write to those ultra-dense platters, or the circuitry to support it. Look at something like GMR. They couldn't possibly have used it in hard drives 5 years before it was discovered.

It may sound ironic due to the above, but the computer revolution hasn't been about technological leaps. No, it's been about fast but incremental improvements to manufacturing.

I guess the better answer is, computer technology is close behind current scientific discoveries... If there was a jump, it would have to be artifically created by holding back on developing products with new, slightly better, technology. I really don't see your problem with improvement. It's not as if they are forcing you to upgrade your hard drive every year. I'm using an older 40GB hard drive in this machine right now, and I'm perfectly happy with it. When it fails (out of warranty) I'll go buy one that is many, many times larger, so it's sure not incremental improvement for me.