How Data Storage Has Grown In the Past 60 Years 100
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."
Re:How long id a song (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] that just about every other scientific and engineering enterprise on the planet conforms to)
Re:How long id a song (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:How long id a song (Score:5, Informative)
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 [github.com]. Disks and network have no such fundamental limitations - they count in sectors and frames, which are themselves not necessarily powers of two.
Re:How long id a song (Score:4, Informative)
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.
1952 typo? (Score:5, Informative)
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.