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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?
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".
Joke's on you; he stores his windows partition on LaserDisc. So that's about 12 inches!
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.
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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 :-(
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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.
See ya!
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.
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.
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
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.