I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it’s what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It’s the size of a postage stamp!
Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.
So we’re looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I’m literally holding it in my hands.
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Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.
Same first hard drive I bought! Crazy we both remembered the model number too. Got mine in 1990 so not $800 I don’t believe, but regardless it was all I could afford after buying the 8087 math coprocessor too!
Forgot about copro. Everyone and their dog had to have it back then.
And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra
Apple livea on the notion of ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’ and can you blame them? They are one of, if not the, most profitable companies around. If it works why change it.
Their customers buy it, so they arent changing that
You’ve never shopped for a MacBook before I take it.
You’ve never met a pro user who loves Apple products before have you? They just buy the upgrades they need (and more) without blinking an eye. Since it’s a business expense anyway, the $2000 in upgrades is a rounding error when the machine will be used for several years.
1tb macbook user here. I have and I can confirm it to be true.
lack of education is Apple’s bread and butter.
That’s Windows users, Apple at least has to make it difficult for users to install something else
To their credit as of 4 years ago all their devices come with high-speed SSDs, the issue is they charge 5x market price for storage and RAM size upgrades.
I’ve got a full-height 5 1/4" 1GB hard drive around here. Thing is massive.
I’ve also got most of the storage devices I’ve ever used over the decades:
- 5 1/4" floppy
- 3 1/2" floppy
- 4mm DAT tape
- 8mm DAT tape
- 1/4" QIC tape
- Zip disk
- Cassette tape
- Punched tape
I’m missing the following:
- DLT tape
- LTO tape
- 8" floppy
- IBM 2315 disk pack
Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.
EDIT Don’t know how I forgot about cartridges (Atari 400 and 2600 - still got em!) and CDROM/DVD/WORM. I have CDROM, DVDROM (in various formats), but no WORM media (i.e. IBM 3363 - a CDROM in a rigid case, before the official CD standard was created).
Off the top of my mind, stuff that I’ve used and still have lying around:
- 5.25" floppies (DSDD, Commodore 64; I think I may have a few HD floppies for PC but I’m not sure if I have a drive for them)
- 3.5" floppies (HD and some DD, mostly for PC; I have a few PC carcasses that have floppy drives, but I do also have a working USB floppy drive)
- Cassette tapes (Spectravideo, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64)
- ROM cartridges (same as above, plus game consoles)
- Iomega Zip (not sure if the Zip floppies I have have anything relevant; the USB Zip drive is in box somewhere)
- Iomega Jaz (two disks; not sure if the drive I was actually working last time I used it, could be completely hosed by now, Iomega didn’t exactly have a good reputation)
- A few IDE/PATA hard drives (not sure of the condition)
- Bunch of CD/DVD/rewritables, I think I have a few unused CD-Rs/DVD-Rs too, never had a Blu-Ray drive for computers
- USB sticks and hard drives of various descriptions
- microSD cards used with Raspberry Pi
Funny thing is, I think I have no extra SATA hard drives and modern SSDs lying around, because most of the computers I have that use them are still in operation.
I didn’t consider hard drives (spinning rust or SSD) because they’re generally internal/permanent devices. (although I do have a SATA dock sitting on my desk.)
Hmm. It gets more complicated the more I think about it.
You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn’t have auto parking.
Syquest cartridges.
I’ve actually got a little stack of punch cards. It’s a program my dad wrote when he was in college, he gave it to me when I started programming
Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists
Just a brain fart. I’ve edited my post to reflect them.
Magneto-optical. Even better.
Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.
There were even smaller hard drives. The iPod used a 1.8in drive.
But we’re on Lemmy so everything Apple does is bad!
What are you talking about this wasn’t even Apple’s invention, it was used in quite a few devices, it’s probably more that people aren’t aware of it
I’m just remaking on the general “Apple is the worst” sentiment I see here. What popular non-Apple device used this hard drive?
They were used in the Dell Latitude D400 series. As well as other pre-netbook era ultra-portables.
Oooo I wonder if that was in the slide-up Somy Vaio from like 2006 that had XP on it but was super tiny with a screen that slid out to reveal a QWERTY keyboard!
The left most one is also an HDD? It looks like what I imagine a tape drive would look like but searching for them shows very different results lol
Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.
For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).
Kind of hard to see the scale, but the drive that this removable platter would go into, took the full width of a 19" rack.
It once held several megabytes, but now it’s a decoration in my office.
Wait, 1tb?
You’re leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.
Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we’ll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.
I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we’ll get those for cheap.
In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we’re comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I’m gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren’t even near the bottom of the specs table.
Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that’s because people like simple things more than true things.
And they crap out so quickly. I can’t even count the number of SD cards I’ve had to throw in the trash. I don’t think I’ve ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.
This is why for retro computers, I tend to prefer CompactFlash. IDE->CF adapters are cheap, and the cards are much higher quality. They effectively become an SSD that works on old stuff. (Just because I like retro computing stuff doesn’t mean I want the whole experience, like waiting for disk heads to move, or worse, tape drives to finish reading. I’m old enough that I remember dealing with it and I don’t need to deal with it again.)
Not a lot of call for them otherwise, though. SD cards have gotten increasingly good bandwidth, which means they’re good enough for a lot of higher end cameras. CF is getting squeezed out.
Invest in Samsung Pro Endurane SD cards, they last a lot longer. I believe Sandisk has a similar product but I have never used it.
aside from raspberry pi(s) and phone storage I don’t see any significant reason to justify paying for a more durable SD card
they are not that mich more expensive, You save money in the long run
There are way too many counterfeit cards mixed in with the legitimate stock out there for me to bother spending too much on any single card. I typically go for the midrange offerings and roll the dice.
I don’t know What everyone does to get counterfeit cards all the time. I never had one. Are they just less prevalent in Europe than in America? Maybe it’s because I don’t buy them online?
Probably the latter, I doubt any sizable brick and mortar store is likely to be sent a batch of counterfeits from their distributor.
In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100’s of kg range.
Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven’t been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.
“Sitting on top” is a brilliant way to display that.
Very effective.
The RAM section with the hand woven memory modules is so awesome. 1kb of RAM; tiny iron rings with fine copper wires threaded through them.
My mother worked in a factory making those things when she was young.
Oh and the wires were gold and hair thin, and they did the whole thing by hand.
This was at some point in the 60s.
5MB of storage in 1956.
That would hold 1.66 copies of war and peace.
Once you have one copy on there it would be awfully wasteful to fill the rest up with a 0.66 copy though.
They could’ve just compressed it using 7zip. Text files compress really small!
/j
A space ship descends and lands outside my door, and and a benevolent Alien pops out and hands me a 512 MB USB stick.
“I crafted this for your species, and made sure it’s compatible with your hardware standards. It contains the sum total knowledge of all life in the universe and can be used to accelerate your species to the next plane of existence.”
I thank him tearfully and he departs with a warm smile, ascending back up into the soon-to-be-knowable cosmos from when he came.
I plug the stick into my machine, and check out the directory. Inside are two files:
105 MB knowledge.tar.piidx 328 KB README.txtI open up the readme file to learn more about the PIIDX file format so that I can uncompress the sum total knowledge of all existence. General gist:
- Uses a compression algorithm with an infinite dictionary based on prime numbers
- Uses a storage/retrieval algorithm based on the digits of Pi
Realise quickly that the file will never be opened in my lifetime
Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller…
You could probably store more in a filing cabinet with paper
I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.
Meanwhile I’m traveling soon and “packing” microSDs, like… 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It’s ridiculous!
I considered buying the 2To ones … but I don’t even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it’s to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don’t even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.
I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge…
I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it’s the root of the name “core dump” etc :D
The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).
And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.
The one on the very right is NVMe.
You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.
