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How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years
Lucas123 writes "Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs. As much data as the digital age creates (2.16 Zettabytes and growing), data storage technology has always found a way to keep up. It is the fastest growing semiconductor technology there is. Consider a microSD card that in 2005 could store 128MB of capacity. Last month, SanDisk launched a 128GB microSD card — 1,000 times the storage in under a decade. While planar NAND flash is running up against a capacity wall, technology such as 3D NAND and Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM) hold the promise of quadrupling of solid state capacity. Here are some photos of what was and what is in data storage."
"Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs"
This is how I'd try to explain the disk capacity to my parents, and how marketing departments may handle it. It is irrelevant due to variations in song length, style and compression methods. It reminds me of hard drives advertised as big enough to store 5 gigabytes of *compressed* data. Not very useful.
All of slashdot should know the hard drive industry uses 1000, not 1024. It makes their drives seem bigger.
Also, it follows the standard. (and by standard, I don't mean the computer industry's informal, approximated, bastardized de-facto 'standard', I mean the actual standard that just about every other scientific and engineering enterprise on the planet conforms to)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Metric is all well and good, but [the vast majority of] computer systems are not base-10 (decimal), they're base-2 (binary). That's why computers use 1024 (10000000000 in binary). HDD manufacturers latched on to using metric solely for marketing purposes - the hard drives themselves and the file systems used on them store information in binary.
If your drive cost $88 for 88 megabytes in the late 80's, you got an insane deal. I think your math may be off a bit.
Imagine that in 1952, an IBM RAMAC 350 disk drive would have been able to hold only one .MP3 song. Today, a 4TB 3.5-in desktop drive (soon to be 5TB) can hold 760,000 songs.
So what! At least it can hold a full song. Put a good song there and enjoy. It's better than having 760,000 misc songs which I never have time to listen to anyway.
In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.
"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.
I prefer to use power-of-two values for my length measurements, too. At 2 cm = 1 inch, I'm way more inches than you.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Why always picking on the HD manufacturers? Your GigE network runs at 1,000,000,000 bits per second, not 1,073,741,824, what a scam!
Memory is measured in multiples of powers of two because that's how the addressing works. Disks and network have no such fundamental limitations - they count in sectors and frames, which are themselves not necessarily powers of two.
I was still in college and I graduated in 96 so it had to be pre-1996.
Wow -- your last post said "mid to late 80s" and now it could have been up to 1996. That's more than a decade, and you can't be more accurate about when you bought what you said was your first hard drive?
Must have been one hell of a college experience.
Hard disk drives use sectors which at some basic level have to be addressed by a powers of two binary addressing system. This means that no matter what else you do with sector sizes or block sizes, the binary counting system *always* comes into the picture.
Right, they're addressed using LBA48, which happens to be encoded in binary because that's how we build computers. That doesn't imply disks naturally only support powers of two for sector counts or sizes - they evidently don't.
CDs and DVDs have 2,352 and 2,418 byte physical sectors. Some Fibre Channel HD's support 520 byte sectors, and of course like optical discs all HD's have substantially bigger physical sectors internally for error detection and correction. A quick sampling of some of my HD's reveals drives with 732,566,646, 3,907,029,168, 500,118,192 and 312,581,808 sectors (at least they're all even?).
Ethernet is even more flexible, supporting any frame sizes between 64 bytes to over 9KB, hardware permitting. Note 9KB is not a power of two.
Wrong, and wrong again. *All* computer peripherals transmit data to and from computers encoded in binary signals. It means that all computer based addressing is essentially binary
Um. Yes, the numbers are encoded in binary. No, this doesn't mean computers can only handle number maximums that are a power of two. Memory happens to be like that because it has to be insanely low latency and simple bit operations like masking off the lower portion of an address is very efficient, but not everything is so restricted.
Wow -- your last post said "mid to late 80s" and now it could have been up to 1996. That's more than a decade, and you can't be more accurate about when you bought what you said was your first hard drive?
Obviously, he calculated it on the Pentium box he put the disk into.
Ezekiel 23:20
Where is that 1952 date coming from? It wasn't commercially available until about 1956, in limited quantities, and as best I can tell, it's from a research project that started in 1953 with the goal of testing the various storage possibilities, disk being one of many. Thus, it's not likely that working prototypes would be available until about 1954 or '55.
Table-ized A.I.