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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.
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!
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.
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.
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Music is still only stereo, and most people are only storing lossy copies of it. When you have lossless 48 channel music at 384KHz, then we'll talk.
How about video? Even with lossy MPEG-2, you can still only store a few dozen hours of HDTV on the largest hard drives. Switch to lossless video, or perhaps holographic, and you'll need a hell of a lot more space.
We don't know what will develop. In a few years, will we all have full-fledged Earth Simulators running on our desktops, deciding when the next rainstorm will be?
How about wearing a device that monitors EVERY neuron, every muscle fiber, etc., to be analyzed to determine if we are beginning to develop any health problems?
Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.
Perhaps with the development of software radio, we'll just set our computers to record ALL of the electromagnetic spectrum, and pick out anything we might want to watch/hear later.
Maybe computer control of cars and servant robots will be possible, not because of wonderful A.I., but because every single possible senario being mapped to an appropriate response, and stored on a gigantic hard drive.
Maybe we'll have our own personal "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", that detects that you're looking at a specific car, and automatically tells you everything there is to know about it, the company that made it, the driving record of the person associated with the license plate number, etc. Personal histories of every person you look at. Reviews of the movie poster you glanced at. etc.
Or maybe a Matrix-like senario... You'd want to have a lot more movies if you could watch each of them each in a fraction of a second.
Well, now I'm drawing a blank, but that's not bad for what I could come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure in a few years time I could have an incredibly long list.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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
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