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Hardware Technology

Hard Drive Memory Lane 156

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the no-school-like-the-old-school dept.
Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
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Hard Drive Memory Lane More

Hard Drive Memory Lane

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  • Stupid Comparisons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:07AM (#14604943)
    From the article:
    The going rate was $7.81 a megabyte, 38 percent more than the price of oil at the time.

    Huh? What kind of comparison is that?

    • And the /. fortune at the bottom of my screen says:

      Life is like an analogy

      Freaky.

    • Re:Stupid Comparisons (Score:5, Funny)

      by Erik Fish ( 106896 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:14AM (#14604972) Journal
      Totally useless. Why don't they put it in sensible terms everyone can understand: How many Libraries of Congress is it?

    • Simple: (Score:5, Funny)

      by atrader42 ( 687933 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:14AM (#14604974)
      At that time, oil was going for $4.84 a megabyte.

      • Re:Simple: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Tordek ( 863609 )
        Actually, no... more like 5,659420289855072463768115942029 Dollars per... megabyte.

        But yes, your mathematically inadequate post did perform its appointed task in causing in my emotion sensor a humorous response.

        Yours Truly,
        Correction unit 6

        • Re:Simple: (Score:3, Funny)

          by trackguy ( 685314 )
          Er.... At $7.81 per Mb I make it $1.9m (1.1m GBP) for a 80Gb HD at 2006 prices (based on 5% annual inflation for 34 years), although this doesn't include the building to keep it in and the small power station needed to power it (and the aircon).
          • I remember seeing the first consumer 4GB drive by IBM listed in Computer Shopper for a whopping $20,000. Looking back, its amazing they didn't list the price as "Call".
            • Ah yes, that's what I like to call, "If you have to ask, you can't afford it". It's the same thing when you go into one of those jewelry stores that hides all the prices. I like places that put the prices right up front where the customer can see them. Usually when they don't show the price, it means that it's pretty expensive, and that they want you to decide that you want it before seeing the price.

          • Re:Simple: (Score:2, Funny)

            by skogula ( 931230 )
            Yes, but how many Megs per gallon does your car get now?
    • What kind of comparison is that?

      The Stupid Tech Journalist kind.
    • From the article:

      The going rate was $7.81 a megabyte, 38 percent more than the price of oil at the time.

      Huh? What kind of comparison is that?

      It's a stupid comparison but if they added 'a barrel' in there it might add a little perspective. Oil was going for about $4/barrel in 1973. Consider now the cost of a barrel of oil gets you 140 gigs of storage. Oil is roughly 20 times more expensive today but efficiency has probably only increased by about a few fold at best. Today's

  • depends on how you measure improvements (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GenKreton ( 884088 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:09AM (#14604954) Journal
    The capacity of harddrive has steadily improved over the years but the performance of harddrives has improved at an abysmally slow rate. Five years ago I would have not like to see the average desktop harddive at 7200 rpm with some into 10,000. I know better options are available, but those aren't in your average home computer either.
    • Performance of a drive is not just about how fast the platters spin. There are limitations on that, too... spin too fast and the edges start to break the sound barrier, and all sorts of weird crap happens, including the platters tearing themselves apart.

      Data density on the platter itself plays a much greater role in media transfer speeds. Spin rate mostly affects latency.
    • For the majority of use the speed of even slow drives is plenty fast. The main problem is that most computers have way to little RAM which means the system has to swap which slows the system in general and slows the drive access a lot (and wears the drive out). If you have enough RAM then for almost every use even a low RPM drive will do.
      • For the majority of use the speed of even slow drives is plenty fast. The main problem is that most computers have way to little RAM which means the system has to swap which slows the system in general.

        Actually, I'd dispute that. Even el-cheapo Dell models now come with 512MB of RAM. I have 512MB on my FC3 workstation and that still leaves me with ~200MB for buffers/cache in normal usage (Windows XP is a different matter, however).

        I'd argue that these days, architecturally speaking, the front-side bus i

  • Why oh why??? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by countach ( 534280 )
    I've always wondered why these advances in hardware ALWAYS follow such a relatively linear trajectory. I mean, instead of releasing a hard drive 2x the size of last year, why can't they skip a generation and release one 10x the last year? What was stopping them 5 years ago releasing a drive of the size now on offer?

    Seems almost like a conspiracy to have a continual flow of incrementally better product without going too far at once and leaving nowhere to go for upgrades. Because once they make the ultimate d
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • That and you'd go out of business if you commoditize your "best effort" when you have many years of research before another advance in technology becomes a workable product. Especially in the HD market where margins are extremely thin to begin with.

    • Re:Why oh why??? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Dysproxia ( 584031 )
      Linear? (FirstHDCapacity * 2^x) where x is number of years, looks a lot like exponential growth.
    • I've always wondered why these advances in hardware ALWAYS follow such a relatively linear trajectory.

      Doubling every year is linear? I always thought linear meant something else. I guess I learn something new every day.

    • Re:Why oh why??? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by NixieBunny ( 859050 )
      The reason is that it's easier to redesign a gizmo to be just a bit smaller or faster than the current version. It's much harder to design something that's 10x better. The incremental improvements in technology are usually about 20-30%, which is a small enough improvement that the manufacturing people don't have to change their process too much. Think of it as an iterative process of making it just a little better; after 30 iterations you have an astounding increase in performance.

    • Re:Why oh why??? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:48AM (#14605549) Journal
      I mean, instead of releasing a hard drive 2x the size of last year, why can't they skip a generation and release one 10x the last year?

      Because we don't yet have the manufacturing technology to place each individual electron on a platter, heads that can read and write to those ultra-dense platters, or the circuitry to support it. Look at something like GMR [ibm.com]. They couldn't possibly have used it in hard drives 5 years before it was discovered.

      It may sound ironic due to the above, but the computer revolution hasn't been about technological leaps. No, it's been about fast but incremental improvements to manufacturing.

      I guess the better answer is, computer technology is close behind current scientific discoveries... If there was a jump, it would have to be artifically created by holding back on developing products with new, slightly better, technology. I really don't see your problem with improvement. It's not as if they are forcing you to upgrade your hard drive every year. I'm using an older 40GB hard drive in this machine right now, and I'm perfectly happy with it. When it fails (out of warranty) I'll go buy one that is many, many times larger, so it's sure not incremental improvement for me.

  • Get Smart (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    " Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."

    That's nothing. Maxwell Smart could fit a phone in his shoe.

  • Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:34AM (#14605037)

    First hard drive my emplopyer paid for was 5MB. First one I paid for with muy owm money was 40MB, and that was a trade-off for a whopping 4MB of RAM. If I'd gone with 1MB of RAM, I could have had a 110MB drive at the same price. At that time, RAM cost way more than drivespace, and that RAM let me multitask Quattro Pro and Paradox under DR DOS (I think you could actually do it with 2MB). Life was good!

    • Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo (Score:5, Interesting)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @02:02AM (#14605121) Homepage
      In the '80s I paid thousands for a 5MB hard drive that sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board (yes, these really existed, for RLL and ESDI and to and from SCSI too), and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.

      I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!

      Later I replaced it with a 5MB SyQuest removable drive (yes, there was a time when SyQuest made 5.0MB removable disks that were 5.25" to a side by about 1" high) that had a window on the front and weatherstripping on the door to keep the dust out. Unfortunately, all of those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!) and by the mid-'80s I was running my BBS on an ST-213 10MB half-height (what we'd now call "huge") MFM hard drive in a PC, having become fully commodified in my computing self. ;-)

      • >those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!)

        In these days of cheap 100GB drives do people even remember 20MB drives with a label on them identifying the bad sectors when they were new out of the box? You wanted to open the boxes, so you could pick and choose (at retail). In IT, you got to open all of the units and put the best drives in your machine.

        >sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter boa

        • Some even had funky cables too. I had an old 12MHz 80286 PS/1 with a 30MB drive that had a drive connector that looked like the end of a PCI card on the drive end. I also had a 80486 PS/2 that had a 400MB drive that had a cable that looked like a normal IDE cable but had about 60 pins and was 50% wider than a normal ribbon connector.

          Oh, and the PS/2 had MicroChannel connectors instead of ISA or PCI slots too. You couldn't put any non-IBM parts into those machines save maybe for a CD-ROM (the PS/2) or a flop
        • Hehehe yeah, and there were some drives with the obscenely long lists, so long that they'd add another sticker and someone would pencil in six more. ;-) And then when you ran your verify pass, you'd find ten of your own, swearing all the time at lost space! ;-)

          At one point I bought a drive that had like 12 bad sectors listed in the outer three cylinders, and out of laziness I just changed the drive parameters to one cylinder below that (just writing off the outer edge of the drive) because I didn't want to
      • I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!

        Are you sure it was that bad? I remember benchmarking the floppy in my Amiga 1000 in 1985 at 20KB/s, or 1MB/50s. I realize that "in the '80s" includes 1980, and a lot changed between then and '85, but I still wouldn't think my floppy drive would have been twice as fast as your hard drive.

        Of course, the Amiga's floppy was about roughly 70 times faster than that of the Commodore 64 it repl

        • I think that modern (I use that term LOOSELY) 3.5" floppies have a maximum tx rate of 32KB/sec. At least that's what all of the 1.44MB 3.5" floppies I have ever used have been.
        • Oh yeah, it was that slow. The machine was an old SSB machine and at the time you sort of had to get your own CPU and bus speeds working. It wasn't really overclocking, it was that the devices on your bus all had different characteristics or operating requirements and memory costs varied wildly depending on the speed of the chips you bought, so you often bought slow.

          So depending on the rest of your kit, you might desolder the stock CPU clock generator/crystal and solder in a slightly slower or faster one. I
          • Wow, that just brought back another memory... Each time you'd replace the clock generator, you had to do your timing loops--in the system block device manager, the system bus manager, etc. In essence, you'd have to get your drivers working with the new bus timings, otherwise they'd @#$(* up the data on your storage and wouldn't interact correctly (i.e. your serial port would be trying to talk to your 300bps modem at 308.4bps and such things and it just wouldn't work).

            So you'd start up the OS patch tool that
    • The first HDD I bought was as GVP Series II SCSI sidecar for my Amiga 500. It included a 120MB Maxtor drive, and cost £489 in early 1993. The last HDD I acquired was a 40GB drive that someone gave me after upgrading his TiVo. I currently have about 805GB worth of HDDs, most in active use.
    • Ram has worsened, relative to hard disks in the last 14 years. Thats because hard disks have improved about 105% each year in the megs per dollar figure but RAM has only improved about 70% each year. This has meant RAM has fallen way behind.

      Figures come from my research available on my site:
      http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/ [mattscomputertrends.com]

      • This has meant RAM has fallen way behind.

        Sure, it would be nice if RAM was less expensive, but I think we've reached something of a plateau for RAM (enjoy it while it lasts). Modern computers run just fine with a measly 128MBs of RAM that costs $30. More is preferable, but hardly necessary like it used-to be, just a few short years ago. Perhaps that's partly a side-effect of faster hard drives making swaping less painful.

        Besides, hard drives have gotten much larger and cheaper, but their performance has

    • My first personal hard drive was a 40 meg full-height in my IBM PC.

      Every once in a while I catch myself throwing 50 or 500 meg files around like they're nothing and think back to how many hard drives that is.

      My favorite "making me feel old" machine is my Palm Zire 71. It's got more RAM (16m), more "disk" (1g SD card), a faster clock (144MHz), higher resolution (320x320x16-bit) than my first 5 computers combined. If I had a decent PC emulator for it, it'd emulate all of my first 5 computers too.
    • I remember back in the early 80s - I think around '83 - having a half-height (!) Winchester hard drive in my TI PC luggable computer. 10MB if I remember correctly, and if it wasn't for the fact that my father was working for TI at the time, I sincerely doubt we'd have had one. It was pretty great, but I have to admit that the best part of owning one was listening to that wonderful 15 second spin-up at boot time, easy to hear even over the fan howl.

  • 1000x every 10 years (Score:4, Funny)

    by Profane MuthaFucka ( 574406 ) <busheatskok@gmail.com> on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:44AM (#14605068) Homepage Journal
    Drives increase about 1000 times in 10 years, for the same rough price, not counting inflation. For the price of a 500 gigabyte drive today, you'll be able to get a 500 terabyte drive in 2016. 10 years ago, you were buying 500 megabyte drives.

    It still won't be enough to store all your holographic porn.

    • Holographic pr0n? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by quokkapox ( 847798 )
      It still won't be enough to store all your holographic porn.

      Even today, I can store essentially all the music I've collected over the years that I really care about having at my fingertips all on my laptop, backed up on a handful of DVDs and my other machines if I'm paranoid about losing it.

      I can store everything I've ever written and all the digital images I've ever taken or scanned on another handful of DVDs. A few dozen hours of my childhood were filmed in Super-8, and have been converted to a boo

      • Don't worry, when those multi-TB drives are available, you'll have a lot new stuff to store. When those 50Mb drives were hot, nobody had digital photo, digital TV recording or MP3 collections.
        • My point is that now that we are recording our own digital collections, they still don't really max out current media, unless you obsessively record everything digitally at the expense of using your own wetware memory.

          I predict that my digital music collection will not exceed 500GB in my lifetime. What new technologies are coming out that will require massive storage capabilities? Movies are the biggest things we sling around the net nowadays. I neither need nor want to store movies on my hard drive w

          • I move my TV eipsodes to a home server once I've recorded them, and likewise convert my DVDs to DivX. I've filled a 200GB disk in about 5 months..
          • Well, from the way things are going you may not have more files, but they'll be larger. Take digital cameras, every so often a better one is trown on the market. With each such generation the file size of such a picture goes up as well. You may still have only 100 pictures as before, but now they're twice as big. Same for MP3, higher quality formats will be used in a few years.
            One of the things I suspect on holding down the filesizes of higher quality MP3s and pictures is download and upload speed. When I

      • Re:Holographic pr0n? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @05:24AM (#14605641) Journal
        I'm not sure I will ever need more than a few terabytes. I'm not into holographic pr0n and I don't want a TV-quality recording of my life archived for posterity.

        Music is still only stereo, and most people are only storing lossy copies of it. When you have lossless 48 channel music at 384KHz, then we'll talk.

        How about video? Even with lossy MPEG-2, you can still only store a few dozen hours of HDTV on the largest hard drives. Switch to lossless video, or perhaps holographic, and you'll need a hell of a lot more space.

        We don't know what will develop. In a few years, will we all have full-fledged Earth Simulators running on our desktops, deciding when the next rainstorm will be?

        How about wearing a device that monitors EVERY neuron, every muscle fiber, etc., to be analyzed to determine if we are beginning to develop any health problems?

        Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.

        Perhaps with the development of software radio, we'll just set our computers to record ALL of the electromagnetic spectrum, and pick out anything we might want to watch/hear later.

        Maybe computer control of cars and servant robots will be possible, not because of wonderful A.I., but because every single possible senario being mapped to an appropriate response, and stored on a gigantic hard drive.

        Maybe we'll have our own personal "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", that detects that you're looking at a specific car, and automatically tells you everything there is to know about it, the company that made it, the driving record of the person associated with the license plate number, etc. Personal histories of every person you look at. Reviews of the movie poster you glanced at. etc.

        Or maybe a Matrix-like senario... You'd want to have a lot more movies if you could watch each of them each in a fraction of a second.

        Well, now I'm drawing a blank, but that's not bad for what I could come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure in a few years time I could have an incredibly long list.

        • Re:Holographic pr0n? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by swilver ( 617741 )
          Although storing everything lossless will definitely fuel the need for greater capacity storage for decades to come, I think that at some point people will be very happy with their lossy MP3's, AVI's and so on.

          It all depends on how good the quality is of the lossy storage:

          1) Lossless

          2) Lossy, but in such a way that you can only distinguish it from the original by looking directly at a waveform / video-still and being able to tell "yes, they're different", but without knowledge of which is the original y

        • I'd agree with you with lossless music taking up a lot of space. I store my relatively small collection (maybe 50 albums) in FLAC Audio format and that takes up well over 20GB. FLAC averages about 1000 Kbps, so that is better than the 1732kbps that 16-bit stereo PCM audio at 44.1KHz does. But unless you add a lot more channels or bit-depth to your audio, I don't see the files getting much bigger. 44.1KHz is already overkill as humans can only hear up to about 22KHz anyway, so 384KHz would be even more over-
          • 44.1KHz is already overkill as humans can only hear up to about 22KHz anyway,

            44.1KHz represents the digital sampling frequency, not the actual audio (waveform) response frequency. In truth, 44.1KHz can only store audio frequencies up to 22050Hz (theoretical) MAXIMUM.

            Though, yes, 384KHz would be over-the-top.
        • Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.

          A minor nitpick--the human genome is big, but it's not that big. It's a shade over three billion base pairs. At two bits per base pair (there are only four choices for each base: A, T, G, or C) you're looking at 800 MB for your whole genome.

          Depending on how you want to use that information, you might be able to save quite a bit of space by only storing the diff from a 'standard' genome. (From a disease/risk analysis sta

    • you'll be able to get a 500 terabyte drive in 2016

      Not unless something bigger then perpendicular recording comes along. Today's GMR drives are roughly 60 gigabits / square inch, PR drives are shipping at 100-130 gigabits / square inch and are expected to top out at around 230-245 gigabits / square inch.

      Which puts the upper limit at around 2TB in a 3.5" drive.

      Anyone know what the next "big" thing is in magnetic storage? Or have they driven PR past the 245 gigabit / square inch level?
    • I mean, it's all on the internet anyways, just grab it as needed.
      Like you would need more then 3 minutes anyways...

  • the old school (Score:3, Funny)

    by rilister ( 316428 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @01:50AM (#14605085)
    "The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."

    ahh. well.... if you're *really* old school, you remember when a mobile phone was virtually the size of a storage closet.

    (heck. That wasn't even that long ago, come to think of it....)

  • Maximum speed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by earnest murderer ( 888716 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @02:03AM (#14605126)
    Not wholly on topic, but this BBC article discusses the theoretical maximum speed of (modern) magnetic media.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3647055.stm [bbc.co.uk]

    2.3 picoseconds is pretty quick, at least until someone makes a faster material.
    • As long as they are still using one head/arm to read from spinning disks, drives are going to be pretty slow.

      So far the seek time has not improved very much over the years.

  • "Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."

    It's worth pointing out that, at the time the first consumer hard drives shipped, phones weren't quite as advanced either. The smallest phones I knew about, for a long time, were the Princess models. But then Congress passed laws allowing you to plug anything you liked into a phone jack. (at one time, it was illegal to plug in anything that Ma Bell hadn't pre-approved, and they didn't seem to approve much of other companies muscling in on their handset business.)

  • Sounds like a new technology to improve hard drive performance.

    Sata2 - Memory Lane mode

  • Dual Head Hard Drive? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nbritton ( 823086 )
    Why not make hard drives with two heads per platter, It seems trivial to make it work? Just place the heads at opposite sides of the drive, shrink the platter a bit to accommodate the two heads, and implement a abstracted queueing algorithm so the two heads can work together.

    With SCSI's command queueing a dual head drive would at the very least double random read/write performance and access times. This would also make the drive sorta more fault tolerant because you only need one working head to read da
    • Actually, instead of making the heads independent like you suggest, it would be far easier and far cheaper to have 2 heads mounted a fixed distance apart (about half the platter radius apart).

      This would slash average seek time in half, which is usually a large part of the average access time. Independent heads would be even better, but would also be far more expensive.

      • Although cheaper, 2 heads per arm would not cut seek times in half. The arm assembly would be heavier. One limitation is arm acceleration, not arm speed, which means that two heads per arm cut track seek time by at best 1-sqrt(1/2), or 30%.

        If half of access time is used by track seek and half by rotational latency, 2 heads per arm would give an overall improvement of 15%.

        Separate arms on the opposite sides of the disk would cut rotational latency in half, for an improvement of 25%. I've read that this has

  • Drum memory (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ribuck ( 943217 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @06:43AM (#14605842)
    I was disappointed that the article didn't mention drum memory, which was popular in the 1950s. The magnetic surface was on the outside of a cylindrical drum.

    Sometimes there was even one head per track (fixed in position) which improved performance by eliminating seek times.

    There's a photo of drum storage about halfway down the following article (which I found more interesting and more informative than TFA): http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/brains/compu terage.html [moah.org]

    • Re:Drum memory (Score:3, Interesting)

      by matt_wilts ( 249194 )
      Check out this story of how to use drum memory [yak.net]:

      "Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
      even when the balky Flexowriter
      required a delay between output characters to work right.
      He just located instructions on the drum
      so each successive one was just past the read head
      when it was needed;
      the drum had to execute another complete revolution
      to find the next instruction."

  • I swear if I hear someone invoke Moore's Law one more time I'll shoot myself in the head. I study electrical engineering and half our seminars start with someone mentioning or explaining in detail, Moore's Law. Always with the damn chart too.

    "Memory becomes more dense as time progresses, it's Moore's Law!"
    "Wasn't Moore a genius to roughly predict the pace of the increasing density of memory? Wasn't he?"
    "Have you heard about Moore's Law? It predicts the pace of memory density increase."

    Ahhhhh!

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