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Some Hard Drive Nostalgia To Start Off the Year
ColdWetDog writes "It's the end of another calendar year and time for all sorts of retrospective pieces. Instead of going back to last year or even last decade, MacWorld has a quick slide show on the The Evolution of Hard Drives which more accurately would be described as 'A Dozen Pictures of Ancient Magnetic Storage Devices.' Still and all, it might be interesting to those young'uns who think that 10 Gigabytes is small."
as of recently. Bought a RAID setup with 1.5 TB drives about 1.5 years ago. The same drives are selling at the same retail for the same price last week. I think this part of our history in drives will be recognized as a major stall in product development, innovation and consumer needs.
I know you have a quota, Timothy, but if it's obviously just an advertising focused slideshow, be the bigger man here, and don't buy in to it, and [i]just don't post that shit[/i]. I know your job is to drive more traffic to Slashdot, but don't take the shortcut of posting slideshows (Even if you acknowledge them in the post) - you're only killing slashdot's long term credibility by doing this. You've never been a good "editor" (ok, maybe on occasion you use spell check) but don't become the John Katz of bad news aggregator habits (i.e. linking to slideshows).
Just don't do it, Timothy. Please.
moox. for a new generation.
when just a few megabytes was considered large.
By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?
when just a few megabytes was considered large.
By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?
Bigger than your penis?
First one I ever saw was an 80MB drive which was attached to a network server and shared among ten Mac Pluses in an office. We thought that was a pretty hot system, 1986.
it might be interesting to those young'uns who think that 10 Gigabytes is small.
10 Gigabytes is small. Today. I have a 2TB drive that is massive enough for all of my current personal needs, but I remember a few years back when I bought a massive 200GB drive to supplement the 40GB internal I had in my laptop, and those were more than I needed at the time. Before that, I had a massive 8GB drive in the machine I used for everything. Before that, a massive 80MB one that handled everything I threw at it. Before that, I had a massive 40MB drive that exceeded my needs. That's as far back as I go, I'm afraid, but I would never say that any of the drives I had were small. In fact, if I had to choose a word, it's quite obviously "massive".
So Bryant/CDS/CMI/DEC/GE/HP/Seagate/Toshiba/Xerox did nothing?
The magnetic disk invented by IBM in the early 1950s contained 100 concentric tracks on each side. Each track stored 500 alphanumeric characters, yielding a total storage capacity of 5 million characters
100x500=5 million?
I set up a 40GB RAID in '99, and my family still constantly ran out of space.
macdot
I have one of those here.
Still runs too, & in perfect working order (w/ DOS 6.22 & Doom I/II on it, & that's all)
---
Capacity 42/MB
Seek time 19.0/ 5.5 ms
Controller IDE
Cache/Buffer 8 KB LOOK-AHEAD
TransferRate 2.500 MB/S
RotationRPM 3663
---
Heh, look @ these specs -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kczc38P7-5wJ:stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/quantum/PRODRIVE-ELS-42-AT-42MB-3-5-SL-IDE-AT.html+%22QUANTUM:+PRODRIVE+ELS+42+AT+42MB+3.5%22/SL+IDE%22+and+%22rpm%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
They'll make you laugh. They do me, especially by way of comparison to the disk setup I have here now:
300gb WD Velociraptor SATA II 10,000rpm 16mb buffer
150gb WD Velociraptor SATA II 10,000rpm 16mb buffer
(Both driven by a Promise SuperTrak Ex8350 128mb ECC RAM RAID 6 PCIe Caching Controller)
GIGABYTE IRAM 4gb SSD (for offloading pagefile.sys, ALL logging (OS event logs, apps that log too), %temp/tmp% ops, webbrowser caches, & print spooling duties, + %comspec% location from those 2 disks above)
APK
P.S.=> I seem to recall the disk did 4500rpm though, even though those specs say 3663 - I think that was just for their temperature test specs on that URL's page content though - man, it's ancient.... apk
The first Slashdot story of 2011 mentions the iPad, the second story is a slide show of ancient hardware. Are you trying to tell us something?
Circa 1972 DEC RK05 Disk Drive. 2.4Mb in a removable case.
Contained the PDP-11 DOS V8 + Compilers + Source to apps.
All loaded from Paper Tape.
This was replaced by the RK06 (28Mb)
Then we had the RL01/RL02 10Mb/20Mb Winchester Technology.
The Good Old RP06's (CDC drives rebadged) of 256Mb. You could make them dance over the floor in Diagnostic Max Seek mode.
Them were the days.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Memories of my A600 with its 20MB internal drive. Stopped me having to load Monkey Island II off 12 (?) disks. Neat, but probably not worth the money it cost at the time.
I was at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park recently, where they have this exhibit going from a three-foot platter to a 3,5" mechanism (next to the disk box marked 777774).
Posted by timothy on Saturday January 01, @11:15AM
It's the end of another calendar year
woah, took over 11 hours to write that post eh?
/offtopic
Here's the secret to immortality:
I think the mafiaa will succeed at limiting disk space before technical limits are reached. The often misquoted "64k is enough...." will soon be "1TB is enough..." well, unless you're storing the latest hollywood blockbusters in their full HD glory
I have two 45 gig IBM Deskstar 75GXP drives, aka the Deathstar because of their reputation for unreliability. I've never used mine heavily but they both still work fine in what is now my backup system, despite being very nearly ten years old! I did upgrade their firmware as IBM recommended though which could've helped.
The Priam hard drive I bought in 1979 to go with my LSI-11/23 was 20"x20"x6" and held a whopping 20 megabytes. It overheated and stopped working until I found the hot resistor pack responsible and shined a fan on it. It was a huge improvement over the 8" 1-meg floppies (which were actually... floppy) I used before. The machine had 128 KBytes of RAM, 2 entire 16-bit address spaces. Yowza!
Wikipedia has a better article on the same subject, IMO.
I bought my first PC compatible Epson Apex in 1991 with a 40 megabyte hard drive. I had so much data on it I was running Stacker to do real-time compression giving nearly 80 megabytes for DOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0. Floppy disks held 720 A few years later I bought a 300 megabyte drive for my Amiga A1200. I remember clearly costing £300, but being massive! Now I have a network server for mass storage with a two 2 terrabyte drives installed and room for seven more drives. I'll just buy them as I need them, as obviously prices plunge as fast as sizes increase.
Pro Coffee Drinker
required both an "interface board" (SCSI on one end, ST-412 on the other) and a "host adapter" board (SCSI on one end to connect to the interface board, and the system bus on the other to connect to the SSB mini on the other end). Thing sucked power, made enough heat to cook eggs, and the whole setup cost nearly $2,000 in 1985.
Later, in 1988, was shocked and awed to pick up a used 10MB ST-506 hard drive for $300 locally from a business going out of business.
In about 1994, I remember once again being shocked and awed to pick up a 680MB ESDI hard drive for about the same $300.
Later again, in 1998 or so, I think, I scored a great deal on a series of 9GB Micropolis 1991 drives. These were also full-height, but they had integrated Fast SCSI-II interfaces and seemed blindingly fast. The total cost for the was about $1,000 as I recall, and they were put into a large RAID case for a project I was working on to yield a massive 45GB of storage. They were the size of a small dorm fridge/freezer when all set up, and we were thrilled at the nearly 14MB/sec sustained read rate of the RAID, as I recall.
This week, just put a second 1TB RAID-1 in my hackintosh. Fits inside the case. The removable sleds were $9 each, the Western Digital caviar green 1TB drives were $59 each (total cost: $140), and the whole thing fits inside a mini-ATX tower, takes next to no power, and offers sustained reads of about 80MB/sec. For booting the same machine, I'm replacing my 40GB Intel X-25V SSD with an 80GB Intel X-25M. Cost? About $100 new on eBay. Sustained read: 200MB/sec. Power: basically none.
Hard drive technology has moved massively fast over the last 20-25 years, and of course, before my time, for the 20-25 years before that. At any particular moment, it seems that people are often bemoaning stagnation, but the big picture is that it is truly remarkable to see 3TB drives coming out in a 3.5" form factor that generate virtually no heat, use very little power, and are as reliable as they are.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Not too sure of the rules here, but are true slashdotters also not allowed to have wine installed and have the relevant 'install' of windows fake files?
In 1975, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln computer science department got a 16-bit minicomputer. The hard disk drive took up the bottom couple of feet of a rack. The thing I remember about it was not the storage capacity, but the time it took to spin up. In order to help maintain a constant speed, the unit had a 30-40 pound steel disk mounted on the shaft below the disk platters to provide rotational inertia. Took somewhere between two and three minutes to bring that sucker up to speed.
Punched cards don't belong in the "the evolution of the hard drive"... they weren't used for online storage but rather for a combination of data entry and for data transportation (in which, latter, role they might be considered a precursor to floppys and nowadays USB drives which fill that role).
Punched cards belong to the era of batch computing (submit job, come back later and collect results), before being "online" (initially on a mainframe/minicomputer terminal) became common/possible. Rather than sitting at a computer terminal typing your program in an editor, you'd instead sit at a card punch machine typing your program onto punched cards (one line per card); each keystroke caused that character pattern to be punched onto the card, and, since you can't "unpunch" a card, there was no backspace key - if you made a mistake youd have to feed in a new blank card and could hold down the "copy" key to copy the old card up to the point of your mistake (this rapid copying/punching made a very loud noise like a machine gun).
Once you'd punched your cards you'd put a rubber band around them to keep them in order (if you dropped them, there were sorting machines that could resort them based on numbers punched into the cards), then submit them to the computer operator who, when your time came (no multitasking), would put the cards into a card reader where they'd be read into computer memory for execution. Your printed output (maybe a syntax error, or core dump, or your results if you're program was working), together with your card deck, would be returned to you later when it was available. If you wanted to change your program you could now insert/remove punched cards from your deck, and resubmit the job. Core dumps (printed on fanfold paper, which you'd stretch out across the floor) originated from this batch era, since without the ability to debug your program online (as it runs), this was one way (other than print statements) you could debug them between batch runs.
***
Other than removing puched cards from this "evolution", they should really have stared it with reel-reel mag tape which was the original online storage media, and should really have put removable disk packs in there someplace (disk packs were common with PDP 11/23, etc minicomputers in the early Unix days, and consisted on your disk platters on a spindle in hard plastic housing with a handle on it - the platters were seperate from the drive itself into which you inserted the disk pack. Since disk packs had to have an opening for the disk heads, you were able to smell head crashes where the disk head had crashed (due to a dust particle or whatever) into the surface of your platter and ground it up :-(
***
I was waxing nostalgic over computer storage myselkf the other day. My first home computer c.1978 used a 300 baud (10 bits/char => 30 char/sec) audio cassette for storage, and I well remember the first 5MB personal hard disks (an external unit about the size of a shoe-box) that appeared in the early 80's. It makes me appreciate the 8GB of RAM ($100) I just popped into my latest PC, not to mention the 1TB hard drive.
...I told you kids to GET OFF MY LAWN!
Notice the lack of space-related development? That's right, computers came BEFORE the Space Age. We have computers today because computers are USEFUL, not because of the Moon landings!
See ya!
Since everyone's posting their first machine's stats, I'll jump on the bandwagon.
It was a cheap machine by the day's standards. I was about 11 in 1994 when my family got it and I was quite fond of it:
Packard Bell 486SX (Don't remember the exact speed; I think it might've been 33MHz)
4MB RAM, later upgraded at great cost to 8MB
300MB HDD
Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, with some sort of underlying program I remember called "Navigator" I think that the machine booted into (no, not Netscape)
Back in those days, I knew no one on the internet and my knowledge of computers was limited to two things: word processing and games. I wrote papers in Ami Pro and Wordperfect DOS, played Simcity, Klotski and Minesweeper, and programmed in GWBASIC and QBASIC. I never grew tired of exploring the hard drive and the programs that were available. To this day I still double-click on the top-left icon to close a program. Those were the days...
Despite being a fortune level company, there's a lot of scourging for hardware. I happen to have a pile of hard drives I offer to people who come looking, and start out with "I have a 120 you can have."
They then reply "120 G? Great!"
At which time I'm forced to admit it's M.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Lame article... which is really just a reprint of photos from IBM Storage Archives site.
I bet the author's email to IBM asking permission to use the photos went something like this:
Dear IBM Archives Group:
I am an author at MacWorld and I have no more ideas for what to write about since bloggers have better sources on the iPhone/iPad/iPod/iOS than I. I'm in desperate need of source material and I came across your archives website. Since most of my readers thought storage was build by Apple, I'd like to show them that you guys have been making storage since before Apple was around and most of my readers were born. Can I just copy a bunch of your pics and make a slideshow out of them? My editor will kill me if I don't. By the way, I was a OS/2 user back in the early 90s and my mother used an IBM selectric typewriter in college.
Funny. My first _three_ computers didn't even HAVE hard drives. Crap I'm old.
I have over 50 VMs - every major version of RH, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, DOS (not so much anymore), Windows (back to Win 95, but mostly Win98 and newer). I use these for testing installation of various packages that I build/release for industry. That, plus multimedia will guarantee many more TB's of disk storage for me. I have found the reliability to be a factor in any drive > 1TB from any manufacturer. They all suck. I have had drives from WD, Seagarbage, DeathStars all fail if > 1TB. I am just putting together bigger disk farms using 1 TB drives. SATA is fine for what I need, I don't run more than a couple of VMs at once, I just need access to them occasionally.
I wonder what they thought was the better alternative? Magnetic drums? They were perhaps mechanically simpler, but hard to stack.
Table-ized A.I.
The year was 1987, and the company I worked for at the time got hired to set up a fileserver for a client. The system was a Compaq desktop with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 300 megabyte ESDI drive, with Arcnet connectivity. I recall starting the Novell 2.1 "Compsurf" utility just before leaving on Friday night and having it just finishing up when I came in on Monday morning... Those were the days..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Like many MacWorld articles, there's a story to go with the slideshow ...
http://www.macworld.com/article/156757/2010/12/computerhistorymuseum.html
Using current technology I wonder how much storage a 24 inch platter would have.
Dear apk,
Please create an account and log in so we can killfile your idiotic shit.
Thanks,
everybody
I remember the old Winchester drives, that got 40 MEGAbytes of storage by using two 20 Megabyte platters...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Back in my day, we had 5MB (you read right 5 MEGAbyte,) hard drives ... and we were HAPPY. Back in them days we were glad for the price of a cup of tea; a cup of cold tea; without milk; or sugar ... or tea.
Okay some people has 5MB removable platters (remember Digital Computer Corporation [DEC] and Wang MINI computers?) and my old man's shop had some IBM 3330 Winchester removable hard drives (capable of storing 50 megabytes,) but he worked for corporate big-wigs who were running billion dollar corporations.
I remember buying my own 5MB hard drive for my Mac 512k in 1986, slapping a meg and a half of RAN and being over tho moon about it.
Back in them days, we didn't take things for granted.
I remember writing an op-ed piece for PC Computing complaining about the need to back these humongous drives up and the fact that none of the drive manufacturers were making their clients aware of that.
Nowadays, I just buy a bunch of drives with bigger platters.
Backups are just multiple redundant copies.
Hard drives are just things I use to take snapshots of what is in my multiple GBs or RAM. (I know some folks with multiple terabytes of RAM!)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I am using 320GB drives because of the reliability problems you cite.
I have some bigger drives, (750GB and 1TB drives for unimportant stuff,) but my old LaCie 320GB drives (with a redundant set of mirrors) are my work-horses.
I do incremental back ups hourly.
I burn copies and store them off site weekly.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
No.
Hey HTH, a few tips to sound less stupid:
GET YOUR PHD IN ENGLISH BEFORE YOU TELL OTHERS HOW TO WRITE WELL;
Become the moderator of this forums before you expect anyone to obey your "orders";
Become the owner of this website before you expect anyone to obey your "orders";
most importantly, get on topic;
don't post, your english grammar critiques, on a site that doesn't have such a section;
You don't need to be a douchebag your entire life online;
Off Topic English Grammar critiques are for TROLLS;
Don't tell others how to write when you're not an expert in it yourself;
A PHD is what you need, in addition to remedial reading - because if you cannot gather the meaning of my words from within the framework of the context in which they're used, a PHD won't help your problem. "Hooked on Phonics" however, by way of comparison, will;
No need to come in here off topic, it's like a kook brand now;
Especially not from a "degreeless wonder" like you who *thinks* he's the "master of postology online".
And, last of all:
We know you like being an off topic troll. Keep it in your piehole or something (which I can't see) then never do it again.
APK
P.S.=> Funny how you "sign your posts" at the end like I do - Gee, I am surprised you didn't say anything about that, but... it only shows you are "biting off MY style", and that you WISH YOU WERE ME... apk
16GB Hitachi Microdrive Microdrives spurred greater innovation in handheld devices, such as Apple's iPod. When the iPod was first released in 2001, it had a 1.8-inch hard drive with 5GB of capacity. By 2006, the iPod was equipped with a microdrive that held 160GB.
First up, I'm not sure there ever was such a thing as a 16-gig microdrive. I think they topped out at 12 gigs or so (at least one product, the Trekstor Vibez, has a 12GB microdrive in it), after which flash memory ate up the market and it became counterproductive to invest in miniaturized mechanical storage.
I might be wrong here, but then every google hit I can get for "16gb microdrive" returns people asking how to replace the drives with 16GB compactflash cards, USB thumbdrives named "microdrive" with no relation to hard disks, and one product with a supposed 16GB microdrive in it that seems to never have materialized, so I'm probably right.
The iPod never had a 160 gig microdrive. Whoever wrote the article is getting confused between 1-inch compactflash-sized microdrives and 1.8-inch hard drives, originally meant for subnotebooks and later widely used in countless media players (including the iPod). The latter are very very small, but they're about twice the size of an actual microdrive.
I did some maths just for kicks: assuming no mistakes (I really suck at maths), with the technology we currently use for 2TB drives and assuming a single-platter microdrive, we could fit about 34 gigabytes on one. That's 34 gigs on a device requiring expensive, highly precise manufacturing - not to mention sensible to shock. Meanwhile 32gig USB thumbdrives are smaller, a lot tougher, and while they aren't (yet) cheap enough that we use them to prop up desks with short legs, they're surely cheap enough that if one with no vital data on it gets lost we just shrug and resign to buying another one.