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?

Simple:

[atrader42]

At that time, oil was going for $4.84 a megabyte.

Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo

[aussersterne]

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. ;-)