Some Hard Drive Nostalgia To Start Off the Year

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."

Amazing that drive tech has stalled...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

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.

Massive

[Anubis IV]

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".

Re:Amazing that drive tech has stalled...

[Kjella]

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.