I was just thinking about this yesterday. Back when megabyte drives were normal and gigabite drives were just starting to come on the "affordable for home user" market.

I remember seeing 1 and 2 gig drives and thinking..... man that's a lot of storage, it would take a couple years to fill it.

Then I look at my current computer with a 1TB main drive and a 4TB data drive and it's still kinda amazing to think how far things have come technology wise.

And the reason I just happened to think about that is due to the fact that I just happened to notice last night that my 4TB drive is apparently almost full!!! It was in the red. Holy crap???

The bulk of the drive is games and movies along with just the "normal" miscellaneous stuff. The most recent game I added apparently had a huge DLC pack that ended up being not needed, and conveniently was apparently also the cause of some serious issues I was having with the game. The game with the add on was 98GB. The add on was 60GB.
Got rid of the add on and the drive is no longer in the red, and the game seems to be running better BUT that still leaves me with a drive that is apparently getting close to full.... wow...

Anyone want to guess what I'm doing this weekend lol.

I'm guessing it doesn't have to do with removing games or movies from the drive, does it?

Not just the storage size has improved, but the storage media too.

The speed difference between a disk drive and a solid state drive is impressive.

I remember when I got my first SSD several years ago. Startup/restarting became dang near instantaneous.

I remember when 10 MB hard drives were standard. I remember when PC didn't have hard drives.

I remember buying a 128MB drive and people being amazed because they’d only seen 16 and 32MB versions.

I paid about $100 for it and guarded it with my life. This was probably 2002 or 03.

It's crazy how the costs have changed substantially as well. I remember right out of high school I worked at Radio Shack and 128mb flash drives were around $100.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I remember when 10 MB hard drives were standard. I remember when PC didn't have hard drives.

I remember the Radio Shack TRS-80. Permanent memory was an audio cassette recorder.

Or a 64K limit on RAM and running everything off 5.25" floppies. My first PC was a Kapro 64.

quote:

Originally posted by Pale Horse:
I remember buying a 128MB drive and people being amazed because they’d only seen 16 and 32MB versions.

I paid about $100 for it and guarded it with my life. This was probably 2002 or 03.

I had started my own business and needed memory out the wazoo, so I started with a single 100 Mb drive, then added a second, then went to 200 Mg + 100Mb and so on.

And each time, it was like I had all the memory in the world.

Just yesterday I installed another security camera outside in my back yard and put in a 128GB Micro SD card, something that's about 1/2" x 1/2" by 0.030"

Amazing, isn't it?

quote:

Originally posted by PakRatJR:
I was just thinking about this yesterday. Back when megabyte drives were normal and gigabite drives were just starting to come on the "affordable for home user" market.
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I'm about to drop the bucks for a 2-bay ASUSTOR NAS and put a 20TB drive in each bay...will run it RAID 1. Yup...TWENTY (20) TERABYTE drives!!!

My 1st HDD was a 30MB mounted to a full length ISA card with the MFM controller onboard.

I helped install a CDC 3600 computer system at Sandia Corp. in Livermore, CA. Sandia did nuclear weapons research for the AEC.

One of the 3600’s peripherals was a Data Products 128 MByte disk drive. It was huge. A North American Van Lines 18-wheeler brought it in. They put a big ramp on the back of the trailer to unload the disk. The huge disk drive cracked the ramp! Fortunately it didn’t tip over, but it was a close thing. This was about 1968.

quote:

Originally posted by erj_pilot:
I'm about to drop the bucks for a 2-bay ASUSTOR NAS and put a 20TB drive in each bay...will run it RAID 1. Yup...TWENTY (20) TERABYTE drives!!!

Need to put a NAS into the home office myself.

Around 1995 I upgraded my office
computer to a massive 20MB hard drive. Was barely out
of the 300baud modem era.

The first separate hard drive I bought was a 240 megabyte Maxtor I ordered from a small advertisement way in the back of Computer Shopper. I paid $239 for it and thought I was lucky to be paying less than a $1/megabyte. It was replacing the 20 megabyte drive that came with computer I had. Remember using himem.sys to move programs above 640K to maximize memory space below 640K?

The last hard drive I bought a few months ago was a Western Digital external drive for about the same amount with sales tax. It’s 14 terabytes.

My current laptop doesn’t even have a hard drive. It does have 4.5 terabyte of SSD storage.

In the late 1980s I was working a lot with audio (professional environment) and was transitioning to digital. Bought my first 1Gig hard drive so it would hold an entire CD worth of data/audio.

Cost was $1000 back then when a thousand dollars actually meant something.


A buddy of mine had some big old IBM mainframe Hdd platters that were monsters!

My first venture into computers was with an Apple that had no hard drive and two of those large floppy disc's.
You had to know basic computer code, there was no Safari or Windows until later.

quote:

Originally posted by Jim Shugart:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I remember when 10 MB hard drives were standard. I remember when PC didn't have hard drives.

I remember the Radio Shack TRS-80. Permanent memory was an audio cassette recorder.

I had one of those. I think it's still sitting in a box out in the garage someplace. Later they released an optional add-on HD for it, I don't recall the size.

Fast forward to sometime in the late 80's, I was working for a large test equipment manufacturer developing computer-controlled semi-automated calibration and QA stations for the devices we were selling. The 1st generation of those stations were in use with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and we were designing the next generation. We were in a meeting one day discussing specs for the PCs that would be used, and had gone back and forth about HD size, bouncing from 5 to 10 to 100MB. The one of the guys stands and writes "1GB" on the whiteboard in great big letters. Everybody laughed.

In 1998, I bought one of the first videocards on the market. 8MBs onboard RAM. My current vidcard has 11GBs of RAM.

I also remember downloading a 1MB file back then. It took just over an hour to download. Now it takes seconds to download multi-GB files.

Some prices for my first office computer a Wang PC $14,000 in 2022 Dollars.

In 1990 Dollars Add-on memory boards cost $500 128K, $850 for 256K, and $1700 for 512K. The 10Mb Winchester drive is priced at $2385.

The PC005 adds (to the PC002) the graphics adapter and 10Mb Winchester drive;

Total it costs $6400.

A bundled software package consisting of Wang Word Processing, Multiplan, and asynchronous communications costs $650.