I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it’s what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It’s the size of a postage stamp!
Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.
So we’re looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I’m literally holding it in my hands.
I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge…
I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it’s the root of the name “core dump” etc :D
Meanwhile I’m traveling soon and “packing” microSDs, like… 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It’s ridiculous!
I considered buying the 2To ones … but I don’t even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it’s to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don’t even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.
Kind of hard to see the scale, but the drive that this removable platter would go into, took the full width of a 19" rack.
It once held several megabytes, but now it’s a decoration in my office.
And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.
The one on the very right is NVMe.
Women had it good back then.
I don’t understand what you mean could you elaborate?
Size matters.
T’was big
The drives were big?
I’ve got a full-height 5 1/4" 1GB hard drive around here. Thing is massive.
I’ve also got most of the storage devices I’ve ever used over the decades:
- 5 1/4" floppy
- 3 1/2" floppy
- 4mm DAT tape
- 8mm DAT tape
- 1/4" QIC tape
- Zip disk
- Cassette tape
- Punched tape
I’m missing the following:
- DLT tape
- 8" floppy
- IBM 2315 disk pack
Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.
Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists
You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn’t have auto parking.
I’ve actually got a little stack of punch cards. It’s a program my dad wrote when he was in college, he gave it to me when I started programming
The left most one is also an HDD? It looks like what I imagine a tape drive would look like but searching for them shows very different results lol
Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.
For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).
what’s the one on the right?
WD_Black SN770M. There are 1/2, 1, and 2tb models I have the 1tb version here. https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-1tb-sn770m/p/N82E16820250263
I remember all the formats shown.
My first machine was an AST Research 286 16Mhz (in “turbo” mode) with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, and a 40 MB 5-1/4" hard drive. I paid ~$2000 for it in the late 80s. That was a good move, I knew more about computers than most people applying for jobs at the time, and that allowed me to make a decent living without a college degree.
How to say you are over 50 without saying you are over 50. I’m a A little younger, so in the 90s 20MB drive wasn’t $2000. First time I had Ms dos boot from a hdd instead of floppy. The first time I ever ‘installed’ was f16 fighting falcon. The loading speed was phenomenal for the time.
Oldest hard drives I’ve dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.
Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they’re getting this small.
I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they’re all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.
2280 seems to be the most common DIY size, 2230 is common for business machines, sometimes in an adapter to fit a normal 2.5" HDD bay or a slot large enough for 2280. I just removed one from the 2280 adapter last week to get data off after the storm came through the east coast.
The fact that those measurements are in inches when “2280” means 22mm x 80mm agitates me.
When the measurement is already in the designation, the only point to adding information is for “translation.” It would irk me if someone felt the need to point out a 2280 was 80 mm long while a 2230 was only 30 mm long. I mean it’s already in the name…
I mean I appreciate the mention or else I wouldn’t have learned it
Welcome to merica!
Welcome to everywhere. 3.5" disks in German are called “dreieinhalb Zoll Disketten”, and in Dutch “drie punt vijf inch floppys”. Both of those translate roughly to “three and a half inch disks/floppies”. Everyone borrowed US computer terms and translated them directly.
No country uses the metric system exclusively. None. You will find exceptions if you look for them. This isn’t some kind of moral failing, it’s just practicality. Look at how car tires are sold for one example that’s nearly universal due to industry standards.
There’s terabyte SD cards now, that are almost that fast.
I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.
I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.
5MB of storage in 1956.
You could probably store more in a filing cabinet with paper
Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller…
That would hold 1.66 copies of war and peace.
Once you have one copy on there it would be awfully wasteful to fill the rest up with a 0.66 copy though.
They could’ve just compressed it using 7zip. Text files compress really small!
/j
A space ship descends and lands outside my door, and and a benevolent Alien pops out and hands me a 512 MB USB stick.
“I crafted this for your species, and made sure it’s compatible with your hardware standards. It contains the sum total knowledge of all life in the universe and can be used to accelerate your species to the next plane of existence.”
I thank him tearfully and he departs with a warm smile, ascending back up into the soon-to-be-knowable cosmos from when he came.
I plug the stick into my machine, and check out the directory. Inside are two files:
105 MB knowledge.tar.piidx 328 KB README.txtI open up the readme file to learn more about the PIIDX file format so that I can uncompress the sum total knowledge of all existence. General gist:
- Uses a compression algorithm with an infinite dictionary based on prime numbers
- Uses a storage/retrieval algorithm based on the digits of Pi
Realise quickly that the file will never be opened in my lifetime
I think I have two I could put on the left side. A “full-height” 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don’t remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.
