Computer Evolution. Harddrives and diskettes!

G

Guden Oden

Senior Member
Legend
When I was pretty new at this PC biz, I bought a Quantum Bigfoot TX harddrive for SEK4000. It was massive! Both physically - 5.25" platters - and capacity-wise; 12 GB. It wasn't all that fast, but it didn't matter because it only took care of bulk storage, games, MP3s, SID tunes, stuff like that. It was also pretty quiet.

Today I can buy a Hitachi 7k400 drive with 400GB (33 1/3 times the capacity) for less than SEK3800. It's much faster too, so fast it can easily be used as a primary drive for a system rather than just a big warehouse for junk data. Not only that, but it physically measures no more in size than any other contemporary harddrive despite it has five platters and ten read/write heads in it.

I had a bit of fun with the windows calculator, and after having determined using a ruler that four floppies are almost precisely 13mm thick, I concluded that this 400GB drive corresponds to a stack of almost 45,500 880kB Amiga-format floppies that is nearly one and a half kilometers tall. No, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it must be hundreds of kilos.

Whoah. Think I'll switch to DVDs when it's time to back up that harddrive!

:D
 
I started with Vic20 and tape drive.

My first HD was 15meg and cost me $300.

I distinctly remember the conversation where I was marvelling how HD prices had fallen to 1$ a meg in the mid 90's.
 
amstrad 6128->amiga500->amiga1200, atari falcon->joined the dark side with a 486dx4/133->pentium2/266->amd k6-2/400->duron/800->and now my year old athlonxp/2000+....
the amiga1200 and the atari i still have them around... ah those were the days :)
 
Not much EACH, but when you have 16.000+ of them it is a LOT of waste data on FAT filesystem. If you have a decent-sized partition your clusters easily grow to 8k each (or more) and that SID collection suddenly takes up a rather scary chunk of harddrive space...

*shudders*

FAT should burn.
In hell.
 
Where the heck did you get 16,000+ sid tunes? My collection is like 100 of them, at a total of just over 1MB. I used to have a larger collection though, around 1000 or so I think.
 
I can remember buying a 1GB SCSI hard disk a few years ago for the princely sum of £500. I also remember us upgrading the memory on a computer to 32MB for a 'mere' £1,000! :oops:

Certainly nice that some prices have come down somewhat in recent years although, oddly enough, prices for high-end graphics cards have gone up. I bought one of the first Orchid Voodoo cards here in the UK and it only cost around £200 IIRC!
 
Humus said:
Where the heck did you get 16,000+ sid tunes?
Click to expand...

Behold, young Padawan, it's the

High-Voltage Sid Collection

My collection is like 100 of them, at a total of just over 1MB. I used to have a larger collection though, around 1000 or so I think.
Click to expand...

Aah, but you are but a learner, so that is to be expected. :) It's up to over 27,000 rips now (and many with multiple sub-tunes as you know, even sound effects from the games they were ripped from). I haven't listened to any SID stuff in years though since the old winamp 2.x plugin stopped being developed, and there's no plugin at all for winamp 3/5 or the new SID format. To my knowledge anyway.

Maybe you could code one please if you're not too busy meeting Canadian ladies in your spare time? :D
 
My first system had a 10MB half height (5.25") and a 20MB full height drive in it. :) The 20MB was really cool because it sounded exactly like a coffeemaker.

I was really glad I had the 20 meg drive, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to install wing commander II! It took up over a third of my hard drive space! :)

Nite_Hawk
 
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