Hard drives

[redbird]

We're going to be buying a new hard drive for this PC, because the current one is past its statistical mean time between failures.

250 gigabytes for $75.

That makes me feel old, in a way that all the "hit songs from $year" or "do you remember X event/Y object?" memes don't.

Comments

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I get to feeling old when I look at things like smart cards for cameras. I mean, a gigabyte on a chip the size of a postage stamp. Holy wow.

[ckd]

I have a computer with more RAM, a faster processor, more bandwidth to the Internet, and almost as much[1] mass storage[2] than the first system I ever had root on.

Oh, and I can make phone calls with it. (It's not even a PDA/phone like a Treo; it's just a phone phone.)

[1] I could buy a bigger flash card than the one that came with it. I haven't bothered. 512MB is more than I need right now.

[2] Random access r/w storage; I don't have an EXB-8500 or a CD-ROM drive attached to the phone.

Postage stamp?

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the size of the latest cards for mobile phones? The micro SD card is less than a quarter of the size of a stamp! Actually if you know the size of an SD card (which is a small postage stamp size) the micro SD is only a quarter of that size!
15 mm x 11 mm x 1 mm (so in inches that's about 3/5ths of an inch by 2/5ths of an inch (roughly 1/4 of a square inch, so you could put four of them in one square inch!) ... it's very nearly too small to actually hold and put into a phone with your bare hands!

And 33 bucks for 1Gb on microSD... sigh
(comparison picture here (http://www.meritline.com/micro-sd-card-microsd-trans-flash-memory-card.html)

Same here ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... I mentioned in a post in my journal that a couple of months back I went out to buy a new hard disk for my PC ... my rule of thumb has always been to buy as much storage as I could for £100. Over the years that's meant 80Gb, then 120Gb, then 160Gb, then 250Gb (ATA100/133 standard IDE/EIDE drives) ...

... this time I failed ... they had a 320Gb drive (the biggest ATA drive they keep in stock) but it was $100 not £100 ... so I had to make do with that ... and today I can go out and spend £80 pounds and get a 320Gb drive in an external USB enclosure off the shelf in the local PC World store (not the cheapest place in the world!)

... my first "PC" was an Atari ST. I bought a second hand/used hard disk for it ... in 1985 I paid £350 (about $650) for a 20Mb (that's right, megabyte) hard drive ... and as I've just looked, I could buy a 1Gb SD card for under $15 now ... 50 times the storage for 1/40th the price, and probably faster and more reliable (and certainly more portable!)

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Yup. Thumb drives get me. This little thing that I can stick in my pocket, and that even seems to survive accidental laundering, has more memory than my first computer.