Lauren WeinsteinSeagate is now shipping 44TB hard drives, using lasers to increase stored data density. They expect to reach 100TB in the not distant future, all in the same form factor that has been standard for decades. My first personally owned hard drive was 10MB, an 8-inch "Winchester" in a case twice the size as the disk to include the power supply and other electronics. It died after a few weeks. I won't even detail the disks I dealt with for PDP-11s -- massive multidisk platters that we'd take in and out of drives the size of washing machines. A bit less than 100MB formatted for the RP04.
Long ago when I ran the PDP-11's at the Bland Corporation, I used to like staring into the RP04s when they were running. They had transparent glass covers and the high speed spinning was mesmerizing -- to me anyway. Bizarrely, when I had to replace my (almost 40 year old?) clothes washer recently, the new one has a direct drive motor that spins the drum so fast (with a similar glass cover) that it is very reminiscent of the RP04 experience.
ideaPDishTo get past 100TB they'll probably use lasers and fairy dust.
Neil Moffatt@lauren Incomprehensibly vast storage capacity.
To describe computer users as spoilt is a kind of understatement.
I too experienced washing machine sized hard drives from 1983 at IBM. I worked on a robotic magnetic tape storage 'library'.
teresa_athome@NicelyManifest @lauren Reading this reminded me of the time I went to pull disk packs out of the archive and discovered that someone had put a stack of 4 or 5 on the floor and used them as a step-stool. 😱 They did not survive the experience. (The disks not the culprit, who escaped undiscovered.)
@teresa_athome @NicelyManifest Ouch. I used to be pretty nervous pulling them out of drives and putting them back in. I had this nightmare of the latch holding the platters inside the cake cover letting loose before I could get the plastic bottom piece in place.
@lauren @teresa_athome I never got that close to disk drives. Sounds very risky normal work practice!
Now we have a flash card the size of a thumbnail with gigantically larger storage
@lauren @NicelyManifest They were awkward handle for sure. It didn't help that they were top loaded and I'm on the shorter side. I was glad to see them go.
@teresa_athome @lauren Software can get very bloated because we are spoilt with capacity.
Horizon Forza 5 game on Xbox is 141Gb in size. It is a most magnficent game but ... why sooo much memory?
FurryBeta@lauren And AI tech bros have bought out all planned production for the next 5 years, I bet…
In all seriousness tho, the way HDD technology has increased storage is amazing (likewise, LTO tape). Nobody thought that spinning and streaming rust could hold so much data a decade or more ago
@FurryBeta WD's somewhat similar devices are supposedly sold out for the year.
Junior@lauren The price is always something that amazes me. I don't recall how much I paid but remember saving up for my first 10MB.
@junior And that was all in old dollars. Enormously expensive.
Shirley Eugest
@EugestShirley And don't overtighten. But not loose, either!
Luna chan
Fugue State Machine Moto@lauren Oh cool! I hadn’t been following drive technology for a few years and it seems HAMR (or is it HDMR now?) has actually hit the market.
Physics is phun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording
WooShell@cmdrmoto @lauren HAMR has been a thing for at least five years already, and those drives have constantly shown to be slower and less reliable than classic CMR drives (not as bad as the SMR ("shingled recording") drives, but still awful bit failure rates).. so they give you the perfect combination to lose even more data in one go.
Best just stay away from those series..
Best just stay away from those series..
RosaeGirl@lauren its so cool youve worked with pdp11's! I think they're cool, bec if i remember right thats the first instance of a unix kernel on any computer??
@RoseGirl As I recall Ken's first version was on the PDP-7 (in asm I think), and then he ported to an available 11.
slash@lauren My first x86 machine was pieced together from other people's leftovers, and the pages of Computer Shopper. I got a 5MB Rodime drive, but had to get the interface card from a used parts ad. It required a _full_length_ RLL controller card. Old timers will recall the 5150 cases had those slots at the _front_ of the case to hold the front edge of these long cards.