Lucas123 writes "Seagate's first drive, shipped in 1979 was the ST506, which had a capacity of 5MB and cost a cool $1,500 — or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate holds 1TB and cost just 1/5000th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte. Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."Update: 04/23 14:56 GMT by CT: The quoted fraction is wrong. Someone complain to ComputerWorld. Update: 04/23 15:13 GMT by CT: TY. The site is corrected to say '"just 1/50th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte'. The universal equation is once again balanced.
$0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th. Still a good value, though.
My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.
It's funny how it always seems as if the next drive we purchase offers virtually limitless and impossible to use storage space but is never really enough [slashdot.org].
Ugh. 20MB, 540MB, 5GB, soon 500GB all filled with binary crap over 25 years of use but free software changed all of that. I remember when 20MB seemed impossible to fill up. It was hard to do with nothing but text files but indeed adding a few games, AOL and a hand held scanner to a IBM XT clone cramped me for space. Then I remember when the 540 MB hard drive seemed like a vast space for text and images on a 486 box. It easily fit my old DOS stuff but then came Windows 95 and finally someone did me the "favor" of loaning me a copy of M$ Office so I could work with them and two 540MB drives was not enough. The same kind of cycle repeated itself with the next computer and a 5GB drive. Sooner than later it was filled with binary crap, starting with Windows 98. XP would have been impossible to run on the hardware and that's where I got off the treadmill. The same equipment has lasted to this day and was only replaced when I felt like having real hardware upgrades. Some of it, like a ten year old thinkpad, is still useful. It's also true that free software network storage has made it easier to get to the things I care about and drastically reduced my overall storage needs that way. Today, 500GB is way more than I need for my music and movies and I'll be able to buy a deeply discounted multi TB drive in a year or two when I feel pinched again.
It's easier to ride the backside of the upgrade wave than to be pushed and crushed in front of it.
I remember when 20MB seemed impossible to fill up [...] Today, 500GB is way more than I need for my music and movies
And after 10 years you'll be singing the same tune, and thinking that the capacity you have then is way more than you need. As computational capabilities grow, new uses for storage pop up. What that has to do with Microsoft is a mystery to me.
I used to think storage lasted a fair while. Then came MythTV. You have no idea the levels of storage you can utilize for video recording if you're not that discriminating (and hey, all those companies saying content is valuable, it's like storing money! Well, ok, I just have issues with throwing stuff away... you never know...).
Then we got MultiRec in Myth which allows you to record all channels on the same multiplex. 6 DVB tuners and you can record every channel transmitted... Imagine the archive! No need
ll those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."
I remember the first time I put the whole Library of Congress on a hard drive. It brought tears to my eyes, as I felt so lucky. Of course, this was in 2007, so I still had a few hundred more gigs to fill up with wares and music. Still it was an important experience.
Seriously, though, I don't understand why people feel the need to simplify things in slashdot submissions. Why would you write "79 million terabytes" when the proper way is both more understandable and more concise. Just say 79 exabytes or even just 79 EB. News for nerds, ok? We didn't smoke our way through high school.
Similarly, it would be more useful to define a quality level for some well known video codec and estimate how many hours that would be instead of just giving us a semirandom number. Not that even that is necessary, since the real news is Seagate's achievement.
The submitter shouldn't feel like I'm targeting him specifically. I just wish more people would take advantage of the fact that people on this site should have a basic understanding of things like SI prefixes. It would just be a nice touch to make things that small bit more readable.
Hell yes... got a 30 megabyte drive that way, which lasted about a month. (But I didn't even need it for that long; I just wanted it make a 30 megabyte text file containing nothing but spaces. This was ARCed twice and ended up at 50k or so, and reserved as a "poison pill" upload for to DOS an unfriendly BBS that had a script in place to convert all ARCs to ZIPs. I was a rascal. I have reformed.)
Oh YES! My Z150 r0Qd! Mine had a off-brand "hard card" which, for all you punks who were born in the Clinton administration, was a unbranded Seagate MFM hard drive mounted on an IDE expansion card. I forget why.
Oh, and it was 30 megs!! Awesome! Actually, it was a 20 meg drive but there was some trick they did with the old MFM drives to make 20 meg drives hold 30 megs. I forget what it was.
That machine was mondo kewel. Had CGA graphics too! I forget what happened to it.
Let me tell you some more about the old days.
Where are you going?
Get back here!
And it had the passive backplane (which meant that the processor was on an ISA card and plugged into one slot, and the RAM was on another ISA card and plugged into another slot)!
And the full-length HDD/FDD/serial port card (WTF?) had not just one but *two* monster ribbon cables connecting to the hard drives in order to achieve the staggering data throughput of, nearly, a megabyte a second! Beat that, SATA!
Mine ended up getting skipped. I wish I'd known how much in demand they are now, I'd have kept it..
The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height. Jeez, you'd think Computer World would get the technical details right!
Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference...;) Get off my lawn!
You're right. The ST506 was full-height, (remember the squeaky monkey-like noise it made?) the ST225 was half-height - somewhere in my basement, I still have an ST225 I paid $250 for.
I find that hard to believe. Looking around their products pages [seagate.com], it appears that 1TB is the highest capacity offered for some of their models. Am I just missing something?
Either way, congrats to Seagate, it is a very remarkable milestone.
I find that hard to believe. Looking around their products pages [seagate.com], it appears that 1TB is the highest capacity offered for some of their models. Am I just missing something?
Yes.
Customer: "I want one of those congress library storing things for the computing machine I bought for my kid". A: "What capacity? 1 Tb is the typical size. Less than that and you risk your kid turning gay overnight. And die."
While todays hard drives may be much larger, its not going to be long before we move on. I remember when I got my first 100mb HD and thinking "wow this is it ill never need any more storage than this". But now we know that as HD capacity increases so will the features and size software and media. Think of how big the first windows distro was and how big Vista is. Soon we'll all have HD DVD rips and real life quality music filling our new 100TB HDs
In short, we as consumers don't need to worry about how to
The problem is that bandwidth (and for that matter latency, only more so) hasn't kept pace with capacity. So yes, we have a lot more storage capacity, but getting the data onto and off the disk hasn't improved by nearly as much.
It's relatively not *too* bad if you're working with large files that can stream. A system I bought in 1994 had a 420 MB disk, which was state of the art at the time. Its bandwidth was on the order of 1 MB/sec. In contrast, the 500 MB disks I'm using now get about 60 MB/sec (internal SATA, at any rate -- USB disks are still limited to 20 MB/sec). That's about 1200x the storage with 60x the transfer rate, so the relative transfer performance (a word I just made up) is about 5% of what it was then.
Latency's another matter altogether. Both seek time and rotational latency are about half what they were then (rotational latency based on 7200 RPM today vs. 3600 RPM in the mid 1990's). So if you're latency-bound, you're really in tough shape. If you're streaming ogg files or what have you, you don't have this problem, but if you're paging to disk (or use applications that create a lot of small files, or scan directories containing lots o'files) you're really in a world of hurt.
Enterprise SAS disks tend to be a lot lower in capacity (74 and 150 GB are common sizes), but rotate at 15000 RPM. So you're spreading out your data over a lot more disks, improving your net throughput, and you're suffering much less from latency. If your application's multi-threaded, with plenty of threads performing queued I/O and plenty of workers, you can make progress even while you're waiting for other I/O ops to complete.
I would love to see a huge sign outside Seagate Headquarters similar to that of McDonald's.
Anybody with Photoshop skills and in the mood to waste their time? I would love to see this.
Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs.
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
I'm guessing that they haven't sold 1 billion Seagate branded drives, but that they're including all the drives made by all the other drive companies they've bought in the past.
158 billion hours is a shade over 18 million years. If you had a camera fixed to record for the past 18 million years you'd only have started in the Miocene era... it'd all look really quite modern. It'd have been a bit more grassy, but there'd be recognisable mammals like deer and wolves, birds like ducks and grouse.
Their lawyers must work out the royalties, but consumers get a very nice copyright exemption. [cornell.edu] Dunno about P2P, but it might also be covered.
all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs.
This just made me realize how much redundent data there is in the world. Think about just how many copies of some media there are and imagine what could be saved if we could find a way to do highspeed, centralized, streaming server for multimedia. Yeah, you wouldn't be able to listen to your music everywhere you go, but does the world really need a million digital copies of the new Brittany Spears cd?
I tore an ST-238 apart after it died the 3rd time. The two platters were SO BEAUTIFUL, their iridescent copper color. And they rang like bells when you suspended them. Those and a couple more modern, smaller, silvery drives and they make the most lovely wind chimes.
Now, I'm trying to figure out how to coat my bike tank in that coloration.
... we called a 5.25 hard drive a "mini-winnie" since the established 8 inch hard drive at that time was called a Winchester .
Back then the two CP/M Z-80 "micro computers" at university lab where I did my class work used 8 inch floppies. Real floppy disk Users dismissed mini floppies not only because of it's paltry storage capacity but because some pinhead decided to reduce the disk rotation speed of the mini floppy by one half thus reducing its data transmission rate. At least that's how I remember it.
Some other graybeard is gonna have to take over for me now cuz I gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."
How many libraries of congress per VW Beetle is that?
Man, I remember in the early 90's being given the manual for the ST506 drive controller so I could write the "bare metal" interface to actually write the drivers for an OS my prof was writing for his research work.
Pretty cool shit, push bytes into a couple of registers to make the damned thing seek to a given track. Service the interrupt. Push in a couple of other bytes to cause a sector read. Service the interrupt. It didn't get any lower-level than that.
We specifically avoided the Linux code at the time since we didn't want to GPL our code or use their implementation.
Writing my own low-level device driver for accessing hard-drives was pretty cool. Before long, I had written a bunch of the simple UNIX command-tools for DOS -- ls, rm, cat, cp. Boot out the DOS handler, read the raw FAT data off the HD, format it, and interpret it.
*sigh* Anyway, this is apropos to nothing. Just waxing nostalgic about a university project 20 odd years ago. It's all been downhill from then.:-P
Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Currently, 1/2 terabyte drives are the norm. I remember buying a computer 10 years ago, and 4 GB was more than enough. Things certainly have changed since the early days.
Yeah, but nobody expected to be ripping entire DVD collections to HD for use in a media server back then. Now it's economical to do it, especially if you've already got a PC doing DVR work. At less than 20c/GB, it's less than a dollar to rip a typical movie (without the extras and ads) to a server. That compares favorably to putting discs into a jukebox, and has the advantage of speed and playing multiple streams at once. Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude
With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
Everybody I know has some vendor they swear by, and some vendor they think is just terrible. I know people who think Western Digital is the best, and that Maxtor is crap. I know people who say the exact opposite. None of these people buy enough hard drives to have any real say in which one is better than the other. Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
AFAIK, hard drives don't use any more toxic materials than any other consumer electronics, and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.
Bad Sector (Score:5, Informative)
My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.
Same as it ever was. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny how it always seems as if the next drive we purchase offers virtually limitless and impossible to use storage space but is never really enough [slashdot.org].
Re:Same as it ever was. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugh. 20MB, 540MB, 5GB, soon 500GB all filled with binary crap over 25 years of use but free software changed all of that. I remember when 20MB seemed impossible to fill up. It was hard to do with nothing but text files but indeed adding a few games, AOL and a hand held scanner to a IBM XT clone cramped me for space. Then I remember when the 540 MB hard drive seemed like a vast space for text and images on a 486 box. It easily fit my old DOS stuff but then came Windows 95 and finally someone did me the "favor" of loaning me a copy of M$ Office so I could work with them and two 540MB drives was not enough. The same kind of cycle repeated itself with the next computer and a 5GB drive. Sooner than later it was filled with binary crap, starting with Windows 98. XP would have been impossible to run on the hardware and that's where I got off the treadmill. The same equipment has lasted to this day and was only replaced when I felt like having real hardware upgrades. Some of it, like a ten year old thinkpad, is still useful. It's also true that free software network storage has made it easier to get to the things I care about and drastically reduced my overall storage needs that way. Today, 500GB is way more than I need for my music and movies and I'll be able to buy a deeply discounted multi TB drive in a year or two when I feel pinched again.
It's easier to ride the backside of the upgrade wave than to be pushed and crushed in front of it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Then came MythTV. You have no idea the levels of storage you can utilize for video recording if you're not that discriminating (and hey, all those companies saying content is valuable, it's like storing money! Well, ok, I just have issues with throwing stuff away... you never know...).
Then we got MultiRec in Myth which allows you to record all channels on the same multiplex. 6 DVB tuners and you can record every channel transmitted... Imagine the archive! No need
Makes me nostalgic too (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the first time I put the whole Library of Congress on a hard drive. It brought tears to my eyes, as I felt so lucky. Of course, this was in 2007, so I still had a few hundred more gigs to fill up with wares and music. Still it was an important experience.
Parent
Re:Makes me nostalgic too (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I don't understand why people feel the need to simplify things in slashdot submissions. Why would you write "79 million terabytes" when the proper way is both more understandable and more concise. Just say 79 exabytes or even just 79 EB. News for nerds, ok? We didn't smoke our way through high school.
Similarly, it would be more useful to define a quality level for some well known video codec and estimate how many hours that would be instead of just giving us a semirandom number. Not that even that is necessary, since the real news is Seagate's achievement.
The submitter shouldn't feel like I'm targeting him specifically. I just wish more people would take advantage of the fact that people on this site should have a basic understanding of things like SI prefixes. It would just be a nice touch to make things that small bit more readable.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The networking world, and the storage manufacturers, actually comply with a standard, namely SI prefixes being EXPLICITYLY defined as base-10.
Standards compliance, pure and simple
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
God, why do I still remember that??
Re:Hackable too! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think what you really mean is you ran out of clever ideas.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
...let's not forget the brief period after that where Real Men learned that early IDE drives did NOT like a low-level formatting...
Only took one drive to learn that lesson...
Change of Logo (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Bad Sector (Score:4, Funny)
Oh YES! My Z150 r0Qd! Mine had a off-brand "hard card" which, for all you punks who were born in the Clinton administration, was a unbranded Seagate MFM hard drive mounted on an IDE expansion card. I forget why.
Oh, and it was 30 megs!! Awesome! Actually, it was a 20 meg drive but there was some trick they did with the old MFM drives to make 20 meg drives hold 30 megs. I forget what it was.
That machine was mondo kewel. Had CGA graphics too! I forget what happened to it.
Let me tell you some more about the old days.
Where are you going?
Get back here!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And it had the passive backplane (which meant that the processor was on an ISA card and plugged into one slot, and the RAM was on another ISA card and plugged into another slot)!
And the full-length HDD/FDD/serial port card (WTF?) had not just one but *two* monster ribbon cables connecting to the hard drives in order to achieve the staggering data throughput of, nearly, a megabyte a second! Beat that, SATA!
Mine ended up getting skipped. I wish I'd known how much in demand they are now, I'd have kept it..
Re:Bad Sector (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
capacity (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
To which the answer is a resounding, YES!
Wrong photo! (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The most important unit of measurement (Score:5, Informative)
1tb = typical? (Score:2)
Either way, congrats to Seagate, it is a very remarkable milestone.
Re:1tb = typical? (Score:5, Funny)
Customer: "I want one of those congress library storing things for the computing machine I bought for my kid".
A: "What capacity? 1 Tb is the typical size. Less than that and you risk your kid turning gay overnight. And die."
Parent
Its all relative (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, we as consumers don't need to worry about how to
Re:Its all relative (Score:5, Interesting)
It's relatively not *too* bad if you're working with large files that can stream. A system I bought in 1994 had a 420 MB disk, which was state of the art at the time. Its bandwidth was on the order of 1 MB/sec. In contrast, the 500 MB disks I'm using now get about 60 MB/sec (internal SATA, at any rate -- USB disks are still limited to 20 MB/sec). That's about 1200x the storage with 60x the transfer rate, so the relative transfer performance (a word I just made up) is about 5% of what it was then.
Latency's another matter altogether. Both seek time and rotational latency are about half what they were then (rotational latency based on 7200 RPM today vs. 3600 RPM in the mid 1990's). So if you're latency-bound, you're really in tough shape. If you're streaming ogg files or what have you, you don't have this problem, but if you're paging to disk (or use applications that create a lot of small files, or scan directories containing lots o'files) you're really in a world of hurt.
Enterprise SAS disks tend to be a lot lower in capacity (74 and 150 GB are common sizes), but rotate at 15000 RPM. So you're spreading out your data over a lot more disks, improving your net throughput, and you're suffering much less from latency. If your application's multi-threaded, with plenty of threads performing queued I/O and plenty of workers, you can make progress even while you're waiting for other I/O ops to complete.
Parent
Seagate: Over 1 Billion Sold (Score:2, Funny)
Best not to brag (Score:5, Funny)
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
Capacity references elude me. (Score:3, Funny)
Yet more fudged Seagate arithmetic (Score:4, Informative)
Units? (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine that... (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds a like long time, but it really isn't.
hay! how much is that in... (Score:5, Funny)
How about a beowulf clus.... no... no makes no sense.
Heh, I, for one, welcome our large-capacity-cheap-per-megabyte-storage.... argh
ok fine - no one wants to hear it!
DOES IT FUCKING RUN LINUX?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OK for music? (Score:3, Interesting)
Their lawyers must work out the royalties, but consumers get a very nice copyright exemption. [cornell.edu] Dunno about P2P, but it might also be covered.
a still cant find last week's email (Score:3, Funny)
Milestones (Score:5, Funny)
Redundant data (Score:3, Interesting)
142 Million Wind Chimes! (Score:3, Funny)
Now, I'm trying to figure out how to coat my bike tank in that coloration.
Inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in my day... (Score:5, Interesting)
... we called a 5.25 hard drive a "mini-winnie" since the established 8 inch hard drive at that time was called a Winchester .
Back then the two CP/M Z-80 "micro computers" at university lab where I did my class work used 8 inch floppies. Real floppy disk Users dismissed mini floppies not only because of it's paltry storage capacity but because some pinhead decided to reduce the disk rotation speed of the mini floppy by one half thus reducing its data transmission rate. At least that's how I remember it.
Some other graybeard is gonna have to take over for me now cuz I gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
Useless analogies (Score:3, Funny)
Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."
How many libraries of congress per VW Beetle is that?
ST506? That goes way back !! (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty cool shit, push bytes into a couple of registers to make the damned thing seek to a given track. Service the interrupt. Push in a couple of other bytes to cause a sector read. Service the interrupt. It didn't get any lower-level than that.
We specifically avoided the Linux code at the time since we didn't want to GPL our code or use their implementation.
Writing my own low-level device driver for accessing hard-drives was pretty cool. Before long, I had written a bunch of the simple UNIX command-tools for DOS -- ls, rm, cat, cp. Boot out the DOS handler, read the raw FAT data off the HD, format it, and interpret it.
*sigh* Anyway, this is apropos to nothing. Just waxing nostalgic about a university project 20 odd years ago. It's all been downhill from then.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude
Re:mp3s (Score:5, Funny)
With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Noob.
Why single out hard drives? (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAIK, hard drives don't use any more toxic materials than any other consumer electronics, and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.