Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Some Hard Drive Nostalgia To Start Off the Year

Posted by timothy on from the for-auld-lang-syne dept.

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."

12 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by Super+Dave+Osbourne · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by thue · · Score: 3, Informative

      3TB drives have become available over the last 1.5 years. That is a nice improvement over the previous max of 2TB.

    2. Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by MartinSchou · · Score: 4, Informative

      If they started released 3, 4, or 5[TB] drives at reasonable prices we wouldn't keep buying up these 1 & 2[TB] drives like they're going out of style.

      Since the issue with drives that size isn't about production ability as much as it is about the computers' ability to handle them properly, this just isn't true.

      Why bother selling something that will result in all the margins being eaten up by support calls, RMAs and constant bitching and complaining about something you have no control over?

    3. Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by Kjella · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I think there's many reasons:

      1. People moving to laptops, desktops aren't that big anymore
      2. A lot of research and focus going into SSDs
      3. Increased use of streaming services
      4. Higher bandwidth means you rather delete and redownload later

      Obviously there's a lot of people that still need a lot of storage space, but having a single 3 TB drive over 2x1.5 TB drives is just not that important, if you need a bunch of them you're looking at $/TB not how many drives there are. I built myself a very plain "server" using a big gaming case, a PSU and mobo with many SATA connections and it got room and connectors for 10 drives. Right now it has a bunch of various disks from 250 GB to 1.5 TB so it's only 6-7 TB total but fully loaded I could now have 30 TB in it, which is massive overkill even for my packrat habits. Of course in the long run it would be nice to have 10+ TB drives but my willingness to pay a price premium for a slightly bigger disk is very low. I'd rather just add one more 2 TB disk than an expensive 3 TB disk.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by makomk · · Score: 3, Informative

      3TB drives exist, but unfortunately there's not a huge market for them. Hardly any computers out there are actually capable of booting from them, and many can't even access them at all due to driver issues.

    5. Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled... by AndGodSed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed.

      Also, larger disk drives tend to become less reliable in my experience.

      I have a server where daily roll back backups is made to a 1.5TB drive every 24 hours. Given that I only do a rollback of Inetpub on that drive I get about 170 to 200 days worth of dailies out of it.

      I would love to slot in a 3TB drive or larger, but reliability is such that I would rather swop out the drive for a new one twice a year and put the full drive in a "storage" server at the office than risk losing a year worth of roll backs due to a drive failure.

      (Before anyone flags my backup method, we do have other backups on three other servers, but since these have 1.5TB drives for backup at the largest and they serve as backup/failover nodes for eight servers total every server has a rollback backup drive in it. We are a smallish setup that cannot afford a SAN setup, so we make do with what we have. That means that per server we can keep about 30odd days worth of failover backups on these servers. Again larger drives would be great.)

      Anything larger than 1TB also become problematic in a RAID setup, where I found the Seagate NS drives to be almost bulletproof - up to 1TB. I would not trust anything larger than that in a RAID array just yet.

      --

      Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity

  2. Please don't post slideshows by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Ahhh, the good ole days... by Antony-Kyre · · Score: 3, Funny

    when just a few megabytes was considered large.

    By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?

    1. Re:Ahhh, the good ole days... by Albert+Sandberg · · Score: 5, Funny

      By the way, anyone care to make a guess how big my Windows partition is?

      If you're a true slashdotter, about 0 bytes.

  4. Massive by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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".

  5. Re:Ahhh, the good ole lengths... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Joke's on you; he stores his windows partition on LaserDisc. So that's about 12 inches!

  6. I hate slide shows by Hittman · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Want to make me leave your page in an instant? Promise something tantalizing, then present me with a slide show I've got to click through.

    See ya!