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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.
" 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.
Linear? (FirstHDCapacity * 2^x) where x is number of years, looks a lot like exponential growth.
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
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).
The reason is that it's easier to redesign a gizmo to be just a bit smaller or faster than the current version. It's much harder to design something that's 10x better. The incremental improvements in technology are usually about 20-30%, which is a small enough improvement that the manufacturing people don't have to change their process too much. Think of it as an iterative process of making it just a little better; after 30 iterations you have an astounding increase in performance.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
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
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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".
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822116148
NewEgg has a Fujitsu 300GB SCSI drive... for $730!
SCSI drives are significantly more expensive than SATA or IDE, especially when you get into the high capacities. The makers are expanding their SCSI lines, but most individuals don't need/can't afford the big ones. If you're a big enough business or government agency, the game changes.
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 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.
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