Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive 245
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.
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.
Wasteful (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Redundant data (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Sure, I have sockpuppets. (Score:0, Insightful)
Nothing is new or dishonest here. I promised to make sock puppets back in 2004 [slashdot.org] and have recently gloated in my journal. It throws the trolls off balance and keeps them from being able to silence me. They don't know where my accounts are or who I am. My supposed sockpuppets are generally first posters who advocate free software. These are well received, as all free software advocacy should be, until these nutballs start hitting them with saved up mod points the same way they wiped out the twitter account. My opinions continue to be well received outside of these people's notice. That opinion is what interests me, not credit for it so I'll keep making up accounts when it suits me. The have made a lot of noise about it lately. It makes them angry that they can't really control the conversation here and they have always made a lot of noise. The "OMG, it's Twitter" has become a new kind of crap flood.
The effort attributed to me is flattering and I can claim some success. I don't have the energy or time to do as much as the trolls credit me with but I have enjoyed hijacking their first posts and countering their bullshit. What is obvious is that there's a lot of moderation gaming and other attempts to disrupt and control conversation on Slashdot and at other pubic forums. I can't keep them from crap flooding real conversation into oblivion but I can derail a lot of the more blatant lies and offensive comments. That has been fun. Eat it PR losers, your bosses should fire you all.
Re:Makes me nostalgic too (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