[HN Gopher] What you can learn from old hard drive adverts
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       What you can learn from old hard drive adverts
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2021-03-26 05:14 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (brooker.co.za)
 (TXT) w3m dump (brooker.co.za)
        
       | geocrasher wrote:
       | For the sake of comparing apples to apples, the 10MB disk in 1980
       | that cost $3400 would now cost almost $11,000, whereas the price
       | of a modern 18TB HDD is $400.
       | 
       | You could buy 27 18TB disks for the price of that 10MB disk in
       | 1980. I didn't do the math, but at first glance, it sounds
       | impressive. But even if your mirrored all 27 disks, you'd still
       | not approach a reasonable gain of IOPS/GiB. It really is
       | fascinating to compare!
        
         | spijdar wrote:
         | Hard drive progression is definitely interesting.
         | 
         | I don't have any numbers, but I have an old SPARC laptop from
         | 1995, with dual slim SCSI drives from IBM. Thin little drives
         | from the early 90s, going from 300-900 MB. And man, those
         | things have aged phenomenally well. The controller could read
         | both at 10MB/s each simultaneously, with seek speeds of only
         | around 14 ms, not that far from the 5 mentioned in the article.
         | 
         | I really don't think the HDDs in my modern laptops are more
         | than at most a single order of magnitude superior in anything
         | except storage density.
        
           | geocrasher wrote:
           | I would agree with that. Today I replaced an 11 year old
           | Western Digital Green 500GB HDD with a new Seagate 2TB HDD.
           | The WD Green still runs fine! But, it's 11 years old. That's
           | a long time in HDD years. Its brother is a 10 year old
           | Seagate 500GB HDD which, as soon as it's done copying to the
           | 2TB disk, is also being retired. But you never know, I might
           | pull them out of retirement at any point for a non critical
           | project. They're both in excellent shape. And unless you
           | change to SSD, the technology hasn't change so much in the
           | last decade that these things are garbage.
        
         | zokier wrote:
         | On the other hand you can buy 1TB of RAM for that $11k also, I
         | don't know how many "IOPS" that would get you but I bet its a
         | lot.
        
       | j4yav wrote:
       | Really cool! I was lucky as a kid to have found a next-door
       | computer store where I had basically unlimited access to old
       | computer parts like these. It was the 90s so it was old MFM
       | drives, XT boards, and so on, but I could get minix running on
       | them and it was amazing. Growing up really poor, it was the only
       | way I could get access to interesting hardware, but you could
       | learn a lot playing with that old stuff. Of course, x86
       | architecture stuck around for a long time and I can still build a
       | modern PC more or less using the evolved versions of this skills.
        
       | a9h74j wrote:
       | I remember having an Elec-Tec catalog with the back cover listing
       | a 10MB hard drive for $10K. I kept it for awhile, thinking of it
       | as _will be iconic someday_. Sure enough, that is the era  /
       | order-of-magnitude recalled in the OP.
        
         | retrac wrote:
         | Why, only a dollar a kilobyte!
        
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       (page generated 2021-03-26 23:01 UTC)