This still makes me laugh when I think about it, the cost of HDD storage over the past 30 years.

[-]

Drew707@reddit

I think it gets even more interesting when you start comparing the performance of that capacity, too. I haven't been in as long as you, but I do remember when the Velociraptor was absolutely ballin' for a home rig.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I will say though, that I was deploying 10k RPM SAS drives something like 20 years ago on servers and honestly, I seem to recall the performance being almost on par with what we get today. Only so fact you can spin a disk and so fast you can move a mechanical arm inside the disk enclosure.

When I think about the FASTEST velociraptor and compare it to even the slowest NVME from today then I laugh out loud for a whole different reason. Storage almost as fast as memory, just insane!

To me the largest seed changes in IT were (in no order);

* IPSec based VPNS
* Virtualization
* HDD capacity growth
* Solid State Hard Drives

[-]

MedicatedLiver@reddit

I still have a rinky-dink 146GB 15k SAS drive that I use for some tasks. Damn thing is much faster that it has any right being as a mechanical device.

[-]

Sinister_Nibs@reddit

My first machine had a 5.25” floppy (could read/write both sides if you notched the sleeve properly) 2.88mb storage per disk) no internal drive, and only 64 kb total memory (38911 bytes free) First hard drive was 80mb (you will NEVER need more than 60 mb). Then came 600 mb drives. Now I type this on a device that fits in my pocket and has more storage, ram, and processing than my first 10 years of machines combined.

All of that to say:

gif

[-]

mini4x@reddit

My first 'pc' had and 8 bit, 1.8 mHz single core CPU, 16k of ram (upgraded form 8k), and a cassette drive, a year or so later i bought a 320k 5.25" disk drive.

[-]

Sinister_Nibs@reddit

My first PC was my third computer…

[-]

mini4x@reddit

Technically an abacus is a computer..

Same, PC stands for personal computer, so no your first PC was your first PC. My first 'x86' computer was a Franklin PC8000 (sold @ your local Sears & Roebuck, Co), 8088, 4.77 Mhz, 640k RAM, I added a 20mb hard drive, and later a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy.

[-]

Sinister_Nibs@reddit

Do you remember the first computer?

gif

[-]

mini4x@reddit

ENIAC

[-]

MedicatedLiver@reddit

Are you sure about that? 😏

[-]

mini4x@reddit

Are you sure about that?

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uvZY8253iC0/WYyUzSX0_RI/AAAAAAAAAp4/eXWTxePw0sck2j64LHbtter9UR_JzMvwgCLcBGAs/s1600/1200px-Chinese-abacus.jpg

[-]

MedicatedLiver@reddit

Isn't that supposed to be digital? Absolutely not a personal computer.

[-]

ninjabox@reddit

Yes, Personal Computer as in, IBM Personal Computer™. He most likely meant that his first two computers were not PC spec, but perhaps RadioShack/Tandy or one of the other plethora of designs.

[-]

mini4x@reddit

They were called PC's before IBM made one.

The Altair, the original Appe came out before then too, they were all called a personal computers several years earlier.

[-]

Responsible-Gur-3630@reddit

"You'll never need more than 2GB RAM" to "You'll never need more than 8GB RAM" and now I'm buying tablet computers with 32GB RAM as a business baseline. It's crazy how far we've come.

[-]

IdiosyncraticBond@reddit

"Your new computer has a 40 MB harddrive. You'll never fill it in your lifetime". Lmao

[-]

zeroibis@reddit

I remember in 2001 being told I was crazy because I had two 75GB drives and it would be impossible to fill them.

[-]

Sinister_Nibs@reddit

Haha
I worked in the Storage Division at Compaq in 2001. We won’t talk about how much media I had (movies and music).

[-]

meetc@reddit

Ha! A single photo from a decent camera will take that much space on its own.

[-]

Drew707@reddit

I'm not a heavy gamer, I just go hard on a few certain titles, so when I bought my Xbox Series X, I forewent the expansion drive because "I'll never need that"...

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

My first XT 8088 had a 20MB Hard Card by miniscribe, you could watch the arm spinning around, slowly... Oh my how times have changed!

[-]

555-Rally@reddit

Mine was a Comodore Vic20 with a tape drive...I was 10yrs old I think, and it was bought at a garage sale by my parents cuz I wanted to play some game on the cartridge system. The guy selling it took the time to show me how the tape drive worked and how to copy a cartridge to the tape...he said, go to the swap meets, borrow/trade carts. That was the hook...and I was off. I don't even know that guys name.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Thats amazing. I knew about the VIC20, but the only real exposure I had to commodre was my buddies Amiga

[-]

jw1111@reddit

That was Vic.

[-]

malcol13@reddit

The turbo charged Honda vtec of hard drives!

[-]

MedicatedLiver@reddit

All I can think of now....

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ronmanfl@reddit

I daily-drove a Dell Precision workstation for several years with dual PIII's, a bunch of RAM (for the time) and a 5-bay SCSI/SCA filled with 72GB 15K Seagate Cheetahs. Sounded EPIC when it booted and in retrospect felt faster than SATA SSD, probably due to the IO optimizations present in enterprise drives.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I bet it was LOUD, and HOT AS HCECK!

[-]

ronmanfl@reddit

I had it exhausting directly into the AC return below the floor. 👌🏽

[-]

Chakar42@reddit

Probably produces enough heat to get you through the winter too! haha!

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MedicatedLiver@reddit

While machine had 16 drive bays, was Sandy Bridge era Xeon CPUs, and was loaded with two 15k and 6 10k RPM drives. Not that loud, all told, but yeah. The heat was REAL.

IBM SystemX 3650 M3.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I forgot about the 15k drives! I now remember buying them with Dell stickers on them for the $1250 price or so!

[-]

cant_think_of_one_@reddit

I think you mean sea changes, rather than seed changes. Perhaps a typo.

Virtualization is definitely huge. Also decent VPNs. Like you, IPSec based is my preferred type.

Processing power has obviously grown enormously too. Less relevant to corporate IT, but the change from a single (or many core) CPU to a CPU+GPU meaning accessible massive parallel compute (mostly used for graphics, but obviously it is used to accelerate other workloads too).

WiFi is obviously huge too (though I find mostly an annoyance in work, because people are so often using WiFi when there is literally a cable right there, that someone plugged in to the type-C hub that they use to get power and connect their monitor, but somehow they have decided to unplug it and then complain about poor signal or connectivity (TBH, probably nothing to do with WiFi, but it makes it really hard to be sure). For that matter, USB type-C, including DisplayPort alternate mode is huge too.

The rise of FOSS is massive too, as, very obviously, is the web. In 1993, it was just about exploding, now it is absolutely integral to most people's lives in developed countries.

The fact that I can be using entirely FOSS to browse the web - my entire OS, my browser, and everything in between, is FOSS, is amazing, and I think is a big part of how the web has grown so quickly, having high quality server OSes for free, with rapid adoption of new technology in a vendor neutral way, or way that benefits the users of it (here I'm mostly thinking us in IT as the users of server-side software). Without *BSD and Linux, and plenty of other FOSS, I think the world and the web would be very different.

Spinning disk technology is amazing, and I'm pleased it still outpaces SSDs for large storage requirements. It'll be a shame when it becomes obsolete, because, like the combustion engine (which I'll be much less sad to see go, because of noise and pollution), it is something mankind has perfected to an amazing degree. I say when it becomes obsolete, not because I am expecting it soon (though a while ago I expected SSDs to completely take over), but because it inevitably will at some point, whether the human race survives to see it or not.

[-]

ARandomBob@reddit

This is true, but the storage is stored more densely, they have more platters per HDD, and flash storage on drives for cache has sped up the performance of hard drives increased over the years. Not nearly as dramatically as the capacity though, because of as you stated mechanical limitations.

[-]

mini4x@reddit

recall the performance being almost on par with what we get today.

I'd agrees for spinning disks maybe, but most most NAS/SAN solutions these days at least have SSD cache which improves performance significantly, even my Synology at home has SSD cache.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I opted to use my NVME in my Synology as a standalone disk array, the caching was just so subpar when it comes to performance since i am seldom accessing teh same files over and over....

[-]

mini4x@reddit

Is that finally a supported config? I really don't do docker or anything that would really need NVME storage, I only have it because I had a spare NVME card, so I tossed it in, only one so it's read only cache, unless they changed that too

[-]

peacefinder@reddit

I remember back in the day people saying “storage is cheap” semi-ironically. It was just cheaper than the bother of culling out old data.

But rapidly it became actually kinda true, then obviously true, then not even a question.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Exactly. Why are you purging data, spend like 4 cents and get yourself 7 more pentabytes! hehehe

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psiphre@reddit

"pentabytes"?

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Whoops, typo!

[-]

peacefinder@reddit

Petabyte x5

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BrorBlixen@reddit

I remember when SSDs came out I posted a comment that it won't be long before developers use that speed as a crutch and we are right back to Windows updates taking 20 minutes to complete. One poster assured me that the number of IOPs an SSD could handle made that nearly impossible. Welp, here we are.

[-]

RedShift9@reddit

I noticed yesterday that the spotify app uses 300 MB of RAM just to play music. Developers are just incompetent.

[-]

Zer0CoolXI@reddit

It’s 10MB for music and 290MB for telemetry/data collection lol

[-]

Yetjustanotherone@reddit

Well they weren't really wrong - Windows updates suck because they're single threaded, not because they use all the drive IOPS

[-]

oknowton@reddit

I seem to recall the performance being almost on par with what we get today.

That is because worst-case IOPS for a 7200 or 10,000 RPM disk will be the same on a disk from 30+ years ago as they are today. If the sector you need has already passed the heads, you have to wait at least one full rotation for it to pass under the heads again to be read or written.

What does go up is sequential throughput. The more data you pack on a single platter, the more bytes you can read in a single rotation. But I the math to figure that out is above my pay grade, because it involves using Pi. I am only smart enough to know bigger disk, more megabytes per second.

[-]

555-Rally@reddit

I still have one of my 10k raptor drive somewhere - it's a 2.5" drive straight out of the server kit strapped to a fancy heatsink to fit in a 3.5" bay, but with sata connector on there instead of server grade sas (sas v1). I had 2x in raid0 in my Celeron 300A oc'd to 504mhz, matrox vga card, and voodoo card.

At work our servers were 15k on adaptec raid cards...I would laugh because my raid0 (hipoint controller) 10k was faster than their fancy servers.

To me it's interconnect. BBS, point to point communications to tcp/ip with no rules on anyone (the real frontier). And then Telecom - modems to ADSL, T1/PRI to fiber. Which yes, means you need VPN's and it killed off a lot of those managed services over PRI circuits.

Virtualization came about really because the CPU's became multi-core/multi-threaded as they hit the end of Moore's law. I was working on redundant servers without virtualization prior to VM's. SSD's ..kinda just a function of commodity sdcards/flash memory being cheaper so why not slap a bunch together with a fancy raid controller to spread those writes out.

I also worked on hyper-terminal on hosted AS400 apps for MRI....200 users on terminals doing data entry for accounting were faster and leaner than today's web-versions of everything. Hands never leaving keyboards, tabbing to entry points faster than any mouse click...menial work to be sure, but today's apps look better, but perform worse. Definitely more secure today in ways, but that's because there's more connectivity. Hosting exchange on-prem without a spam filter/proxy...no redundancy for >1000 mailboxes...you just don't do that today.

[-]

Sinister_Nibs@reddit

iSCSI, baby!

[-]

DonkeyTron42@reddit

FC FTW.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I mean, I love them both, for different reasons!

[-]

seanhead@reddit

The power consumption of a few shelves of 10k or 15k drives would eat you alive vs modern stuff. I've got a 24 disk (plus some nvme cache) zfs pool at home that will read/write fast enough to saturate 10gbe but only uses 2 amps at idle, that was probably 30amps 20 years ago :p

[-]

wawzat@reddit

I have a Velociraptor still humming along in one of my servers.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

How old is it? I have also had 12 year old drives just keep on keeping on.. Sometimes you get the opposite of a lemon and they just wont die!

[-]

wawzat@reddit

It's over 17 years old at this point. Nearly 100% uptime.

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odellrules1985@reddit

Technology is the one place where cost to performance has gotten better. Its some to do eith not being heavily regulated. But I do marvel at the fact that a Pentium from 20+ years ago isn't that far off, without inflation, from a top end CPU now yet the performance difference is staggering.

Its nice to see a market where price stays the same while the product improves.

[-]

AbjectFee5982@reddit

Still is for a PS2

[-]

dtham@reddit

I had a velociraptor drive. 10gb or something. Felt fast before SSD. You could do a regular 3.5” and short stroke it to use only the inner 2.5” or so platters so seems were faster.

[-]

1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit

Before SSD became affordable, I ran my work PC with 4 disks in RAID0.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

playing with fire I see! I love/hate RAID0. SOOOO fast and so succeptible to total and complete data loss!

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1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit

I always kept my files on the network, and had a USB drive with a Clonezilla image of my machine for superfast restores...

At the time I was running an Ubuntu desktop, managing a shop with 50 Windows servers... it was quite the conflict.

I never got a chance to test SSDs on RAID0, as my role has changed over the years. I could only think that there isn't a RAID Controller or Disk Controller in a PC good enough to send enough data down the pipe to get 400% Read\Write speeds.

It might work, but when it comes to testing, I frequently found some controllers that supported RAID 0, didn't actually deliver anything better then RAID 1 or RAID 5 speeds. And I always did the math to find out too!

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

haha, I remember that too!

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dukandricka@reddit

The last "killer app" we had, tech-wise, was adoption of SSDs (and yes I'm referring to SATA/AHCI, not NVMe). Once you adopt a storage medium that has virtually no latency, it's really difficult going back. NVMe, of course, improved on this as well (not just latency but bandwidth as well), but SSDs were revolutionary.

I do remember my Velociraptor, too. Loved that thing.

Footnote: I'm likely about the same age as TechNerd5000 (as I absolutely remember using Renegade).

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I agree. SSD's changed the name of the game, when memory and storage approach similar vectors the seed change was inevitable.

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SenTedStevens@reddit

I remember I bought a Raptor drive sometime between 2004-2008. It was a 20GB 10k drive. That drive was ridiculously fast. I did a side by side comparison with a roommate's 7,200 rpm drive and the difference was insane. I had that drive until lightning hit my PC and fried everything.

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Wait, lightning???? Thats a story we need to hear!

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VariousProfit3230@reddit

Oh man, the Velociraptor and the 7200 Scorpio Blacks were the consumer drives to have back in the day.

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bot403@reddit

I had the pleasure to do an operation on my desktop NVMe drive which could realistically push it just a little bit so I opened up task manager. 1.3GB/s read speed. On a HOME machine. Without even trying too hard.

[-]

Megablep@reddit

I work with people who still think HDDs top out at 100MB/s max. Hell, even my "slow" 5400 drives are around 270MB/s IIRC.

You might not see speeds that saturate a SATA connection, but they're still plenty good enough for a 2.5Gb home network.

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PC509@reddit

I so badly wanted a couple of those Velociraptor drives in RAID0. They were the ultimate, fastest drives ever and just so amazing. No matter what I did to my PC - fastest CPU, video cards, RAM, overclocking, the HDD was the slowest part.

Never got them but eventually upgraded to slow SSD's (still much, much faster than a spinner!) before going to NVME drives (good ones, finally!). I still have a 7200RPM HDD for storage in my main PC. Sometimes, I'll need to make space on a drive (have a 1TB OS NVME and a 2TB Games drive) and move a game to the spinner. Forget, then go to play the game. HUGE, like massively huge, difference. It's not a "takes a little longer to load", it's a "takes a hell of a long time to load!". Commodore 64 floppy vs. cassette type of difference (20 minutes for Zaxxon on cassette).

[-]

Drew707@reddit

Someone above mentioned you could "short stroke" them where they only used the inner 2.5" of the platters for even more speed. I had no idea that was a feature.

[-]

Djblinx89@reddit

I haven't thought about those Velociraptor drives in a very, very long time!

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af_cheddarhead@reddit

First Hard Drive was one I ordered from Hard Drives International off an ad in The Computer Shopper.

I ordered a 40MB MFM drive with controller card for $279, they shipped the drive with an RLL controller which gave me 60MB for the same price. Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner.

*For the young'uns here, the only difference between an MFM and a RLL drive was the encoding used to store the data, RLL was quite a bit more efficient but they charged big bucks for that efficiency.

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NotYetReadyToRetire@reddit

My first hard drive was a 10MB WD drive from PCs Limited for $500. You might recognize PCs Limited better under their current name of Dell.

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I had a miniscribe hard card for I think 20MB. It was SLLLLOWWWWW

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NotYetReadyToRetire@reddit

I'm sure that the hard drive I had back then was very slow compared to today's drives, but coming from dual 360K floppies it was amazingly fast.

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ShalomRPh@reddit

Wasn’t it 65 meg, not 60? Pretty sure the 40 meg drives went to 65 with the RLL controller. I still have my license for SpinRite; bought it at like 2.0 for optimizing the interleave on that thing.

I still have my late father’s first PC/AT in the basement. 256k motherboard upgraded to 512k by double-stacking the chips in their sockets, then back-filling to 640k from an extended memory card. It also had the 65meg RLL drive.

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af_cheddarhead@reddit

For me, it wasn't swapping out a circuit board as the controller was a separate ISA expansion card that gave the RLL capabilities.

I'm fairly certain it was 60 MB, but it was a long time ago so it's possible it was 65.

[-]

no_regerts_bob@reddit

debug

g=c800:5

Burned into my brain

[-]

primalsmoke@reddit

This makes sense. I never knew the difference. I had a 20 mb MFM, drive, couldn't afford the 30 Mb RLL. Somehow I was under the impression that RLL was less reliable. So my next drive was a 40MB.

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jamenjaw@reddit

Renegade bbs ahh the memories and phone bills!

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

I think at one point I had 2 phone lines going into my room at my folks' house, and I could barely afford it!

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jamenjaw@reddit

I was on prolink back in the day that one had at peek like 80 lines and still people would say 50+ redial attempts before log in

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sleepdog-c@reddit

My first hard drive was 10 Meg and came with a separate controller card and a sheet of paper with a list of bad sectors to enter in the controller

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

soo remember that!

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BoredTechyGuy@reddit

A fellow Renegade SysOp! Nice!

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Ahh the old SysOp BBS days. I wish I still had all my files, i would love to spin that old computer up and run that again. Get some land lines and go proper old school!

[-]

BoredTechyGuy@reddit

They still live on in the land of telnet and ssh!

Synchro.net and Mystik are two boards still being developed. They can run on linux or windows.

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robidog@reddit

Yes it’s mind boggling. Add to that the micro SD card holding a TB of data. Crazy if you look back at the beginnings.

As for disks I can top your example, lol. In 1989 I ordered a Quantum 100MB SCSI disk for my Amiga 2000 directly from the US, at $1000. It was not even available in my country I believe, or was even more expensive, I don’t remember.

A Quantum 3.5in SCSI disk was the hot shit because normal PCs (e.g. IBM XT) had slow, loud, and “dumb” 5.25in 40MB drives that needed special controllers.

[-]

gregsting@reddit

Micro SD are serisously crazy. A friend of mine bought a 1GB microdrive (compactflash format) around 2001. The damn thin cost $1000. I remember my first 1GB USB stick for $80, I found it crazy to fit one movie on one USB drive

[-]

listur65@reddit

You definitely have me beat!

I wish I remembered the specs of my first PC, but teenager me was super stoked to order the 3dfx Voodoo card so I could play this revolutionary new game, Diablo. Once a few more joined and we figured out the original battle.net stuff my career path was set in stone lol

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Voodoo card! yes!

My computers went;

-Apple 2e with 128k card and dual floppies. and Kraft joystick!

-Zenith 8088 XT with a 20Mb miniscribe hard card, and it was SOOOOOOO slow. best clicky keyboard ever though!

-Custom built from Latron Computers (pour one out for custom PC stores) 386dx/40 with 4MB ram, 213MB maxtor HDD, Super VGA graphics card but still a amber mono monitor. Shortly thereafter upgraded to 340B Maxtor (2 drives!!), and 16MB of RAM, which i paid $400 for!

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listur65@reddit

Ohh dang, I almost forgot about that. We had an Apple as well! Not sure if it was a 2e or how many models there were. I believe it had 2 external 5.25" floppy drives.

I remember playing an old drug smuggling game called Taipan with my brother, and I think Print Shop Pro was an editor we used to play around with. I know there were some other games, I wish I could remember what they were. I was probably only 7 or 8 at that time.

Only other thing I remember from that first computer build is that it must have been a Pentium II. I remember it being one of the big slot processors haha

[-]

Slippy_27@reddit

I celebrate his entire catalogue.

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

hahahaha!

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BloodFeastMan@reddit

I was managing my BBS

What was your node #? :)

My first 486(/25) came loaded out with 2mb ram, it had two series of four slots each, with 256k chips, I ended up putting four 1mb chips on one series, and had four 256k in the other .. sporting 5mb ram! I'd planned on installing OS/2 to run my BBS, (I'd been using DOS / Desqview / QEMM) and wanted to be loaded out :)

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Hah

I ran my BBS called "The Armoury" on a 386 DC/40 with 16MB Ram (baller I know I know), a 213 Maxtor and a 340 Maxtor hard drive. I had a SUPER VGA graphics card, and I am trying to remember the software I ran to double the hard drive capacity.... Darn it... brain fog, getting old!!!

[-]

BloodFeastMan@reddit

Stacker?

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qkdsm7@reddit

Upgrading from 1mb to 4mb with that first 386 was HUGE.

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BloodFeastMan@reddit

I currently have 25,600 times more ram than I had with my old 486/25 :)

I opened the paper one Sunday, the thing was on sale at a local department store for $999, I told my wife, "Look! A 486 for under a thousand bucks!" She told me I could go buy it if I promised to quit smoking, so I did.

[-]

Drew707@reddit

My current workstation has more RAM than all but my two most recent computers have storage and somehow I still think I need more.

[-]

hamshanker69@reddit

93? Pah, newcomer.

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

hahahaha classic

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2FalseSteps@reddit

14k baud?

Oh, sure. Rub it in, Mr. Moneybags.

All I had was a 2400 baud modem and a 200Meg HD. :(

When I upgraded to a 640Meg WD HD, I though I'd never fill it up. That actually lasted a few months.

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Well to be clear I started with a 1200 baud modem, then bought a used 9600 card from a buddy, and eventually was able to save up for a 14,400 US Robotics external. I would yank it from my machine and go to buddies house friday night every week and we would plug it into his computer, and he had 2 phone lines!

We would then download totally legit software all night long and then make 2 copies of everything we downloaded. I remember when a good game took 5-10 1.44Mb 3.5" floppies...

[-]

BloodFeastMan@reddit

My first modem was on a Commodore VIC-20, it was the kind where you dialed up on your phone, when you got tone, you unplugged the curly wire that went to the receiver and plugged it into the modem

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555-Rally@reddit

The cups on those...300baud iirc? Maybe I'm misremembering...

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2FalseSteps@reddit

I couldn't afford the modem for my C-64.

I had 2 of the 1541 floppy drives, though. That was awesome! Unless it was set up in your bedroom and accessing those drives in the middle of the night...

[-]

BloodFeastMan@reddit

I also had a C-64, and I know how you ran two floppies .. You had to take the cover off of one of them, and cut one of the solder jumpers with a razor blade in order to make it device #9, instead of the default device #8!

[-]

2FalseSteps@reddit

Either I'm getting that oldtimer's disease, or you had a very different model than me.

I don't recall having to make any mods at all.

Then again, it's been a few years...

[-]

BloodFeastMan@reddit

Those things plugged in in-line, as in serial, by default, the floppy was serial device #8. The printer was in the same serial line, I forget what its device number was.

[-]

2FalseSteps@reddit

Oh, God! The printers!

I had an Okidata dot-matrix printer.

Fucking thing could wake up an entire neighborhood!

[-]

KooperGuy@reddit

I enjoyed my visit to the retirement center via this thread today friends, thank you

[-]

TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

Haha

[-]

sgt_Berbatov@reddit

I acquired a custom built 486 from 1991/1992 and it came with the initial invoice. It's been a long time since I have looked at it, but I am sure the Samsung 250MB hard drive it has cost about £800/900 back then.

I should find it and scan it, it's a wonderful artifact of the past.

[-]

davidbrit2@reddit

Physical sizes, too. Imagine the throughput of a station wagon stuffed completely full of 1-2 TB microSD cards.

[-]

sasquatch727@reddit

There's an old adage that goes something like "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of hard drives traveling at 70mph"

[-]

ronmanfl@reddit

Move over, AWS Snowball, here comes the Azure Data Truckster!

[-]

davidbrit2@reddit

Hell yeah, the latency sucks, but the bit rate is off the charts!

[-]

Sea-Oven-7560@reddit

In '84 a 1GB HDD was $1000 and we all wondered who would need all that storage.

[-]

jailh@reddit

No way. 50MB maybe, not 1GB.

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Verukins@reddit

my first HDD was a humungous 10MB for my Amiga 2000, running a BBS at the time on a 9600 baud modem.

Cant rmember exactly how much it cost - but it was in the hundreds - and was 2nd hand. This was in the late 80's (i think) - and also $AUD - so more expensive compared to other parts of the world.

Nice to see someone from the same (or similar) generation here! :-)

I do sometimes imagine going back and telling teenage nerd me that by the time im 50, 8TB will be possible on something the size of my fingernail (SD card)

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frankv1971@reddit

>>My first real modern hard drive I had purchased (in 1991) was a Parallel ATA Maxtor 340MB Drive for $300 before tax.

I can top that one. I paid 1100 guilders (around $400-500 then) for a 100MB HDD in 1991

The company I worked for at that time called me crazy as they had a 40MB disk in their server and had plenty of space left.

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SuperSimpSons@reddit

Well nostalgia aside this is a little like asking why anyone can now afford a smartphone that has more processing power than the lunar lander. Society marches forward and storage capacity isn't that big of a deal anymore, especially in the era of AI when data transfer speeds need to catch up with processing speed. You see storage servers used in AI going full SSD rather than HDD there's even a term for it, AFA (all-flash array, like this Gigabyte server www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Rack-Server/S183-SH0-AAV1?lan=en) So HDD may be dirt cheap now but that's partl because technology has kind of moved on. Just my 2 €

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FarToe1@reddit

I remember 1993. I bought my first replacement hard drive. 40mb seagate ST351A/X (Or similar - this is from memory) and it cost me a whole week's wages and was a huge upgrade from the 10mb MFM/RLL 5.25" FULL HEIGHT hdd's I had scrounged before then.

It was fun to be alive when SSD and NVME storage was rewriting all the rules, and to experience all the negativity towards them. ("The trouble with SSDs is they just stop working - no warning, no strange noises - they just die and you can't recover anything" - actual quote I remember)

And the ridiculous storage you can get on TF Cards - that still blows my mind that something the size of my little finger's nail can hold a terabyte of information.

Fortunately, to use all this space, we have Windows installs that use 60Gb of space, growing even more without warning when updating. Good job we don't need to install it on 1.4mb floppies these days.

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rickroepke@reddit

Back in the day of 1986, our DEC VAX had a 400MB platter that cost $16000. 10 years later I bought a 16000 MB disk for $400

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ShalomRPh@reddit

First real computer I ever used was a PDP-11/34 (I’m not that old, though. It was about 1982 and I was in 9th grade at the time.) That thing had a 5.4 meg hard drive with removable platter; even with 12 concurrent logins we couldn’t imagine ever running out of space on it.

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ResisterImpedant@reddit

Damn I'm old.

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Geminii27@reddit

(Around 40% more storage per dollar per year, consistently, if anyone's interested.)

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the_doughboy@reddit

Or the density. The same storage that took a rack of spinning drives is now 2U. (And half of that are load balanced/fault tolerant controllers)

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3298p53@reddit

I had a 7 rack EMC VMAX that got replaced by a 1 rack XIO2, that got replaced by a 6U Pure X90. Crazy

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Travisx@reddit

Nostalgia overload. I also am old enough to be mind blown by the improvements in storage, memory and cpu. My gf gives me a look every time I see a new multi TB ssd announced and I do the quick math to figure out how much it would have cost in 1990 ish.
Your call back to the US robotics was seven more nostalgic. My main email is and has been my name followed by an ‘X’. In homage to the US robotics X2 modems that made my MUDding 2x as fast!

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posixUncompliant@reddit

Things I remember. My first harddrive was 20mb, on my 8088. That whole rig, with its printer was the most expensive thing I'd ever bought. It was like 2 years of paper routes and chores, and whatever else I could scrounge.

I remember being very proud of managing 36TB of storage globally, and it was the highlight point on my resume at one time.

I remember my first terabyte and my first petabyte file system.

I remember designing a system to handle 1tb/hr writes.

Throughout all of it, the thing that's stuck with me is that we keep finding a way to need more storage, more power. By the time I retire, I expect that exabyte systems will be relatively common, and yottabyte setups to exotic, and if not extant, at least likely in the near future. I have no idea what kinds of things we will be doing with that much concentrated data, nor how we will be able to turn it into information...but I know we will.

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Annh1234@reddit

Years ago, I had a database of about 2PB.

We had some 800 SAS HDDs and like 70 servers in 3 racks for that.

A few years ago we got more storage in two 4U supermicro servers lol

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BrianKronberg@reddit

Replace Renegade with RemoteAccess BBS and this could be my story.

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Weary_Patience_7778@reddit

Yeah. Crazy isn’t it!

June 1993. My first PC had a 105MB ‘Alps Electric’ drive. They’re still around I believe, but no longer manufacture drives.

Cue 1995. Birthday present. Microsoft flight sim 5.1. CD edition (wowsers). I think it was about a 90MB install but still needed the CD to run. Suddenly the math ain’t mathin.

Visit to the local PC shop who installed a whopping 1GB drive for, I think about $300 (could be wrong). Doubling RAM from 4MB to 8MB was also another $400.

Today, I now have a stash of 256GB-1TB SSDs strewn throughout my top drawer, with no idea of what’s on them (I’m not missing it, whatever it is)

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bc531198@reddit

I remember going from a 400 MB drive to 5 GB in the mid 90s, putting Windows 95 on it with about 20 floppies, and thinking how life-changing that was... now I can download a Linux ISO and put it on a thumb drive and boot it in under 10 minutes

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winky9827@reddit

Ironically, I can now download an ISO faster than I can copy it to the thumb drive (using cheap ass slow Microcenter thumb drives, at least).

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1996Primera@reddit

I still have a relic Quantum bigfoot 1Gb(ish) drive & its nearly the size of a text book

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threegigs@reddit

Sometime before 2000, I had three Seagate ST410800N drives. Bought them used off of an auction site (wasn't eBay, forget which).

They were 5.25 inch full height (as in 2x the height of a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive) drives. Full tower PC case rocked when they started up, there was serious inertia involved. And they ran hot as hell, too. But boy was I ever ballin' on storage. I had ripped every CD I could get my hands on to .mp3, and ran an FTP server that had a lot of people on #irc channels jealous.

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theHonkiforium@reddit

Renegade!? Telegard 4 life! ;)

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TechNerd5000@reddit (OP)

haha, I had friends that ran PCboard and Wildcat, and def frequented some on Telegard. I dont remember why i picked Renegade.

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theHonkiforium@reddit

Regardless, I'm sure we can agree PCBoard was for lamers. :)

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theHonkiforium@reddit

I'm sure we can agree PCBoard was for lamers. :)

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MacGuyverism@reddit

Our first PC had two hard drives. A 20MB and a 40MB. My father's friend told him there was no point in adding the 40MB drive as he'd never manage to fill up the 20MB drive anyway. It didn't take that long to prove them wrong, especially once I discovered the wonderful world of BBSes.

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tokolos@reddit

My first SCSI drive was $600 for a 200 meg drive.

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ALightShow@reddit

I ran WWIV with a smallish drive. I remember how great it was when he bought the Full Height 1GB drive. What are you going to do with all that space?!?!?

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zephalephadingong@reddit

My first home PC had less then a gig of hard drive space. I don't remember the exact amount since I was like 11. I currently have a TB portable hard drive in my backpack.

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Squossifrage@reddit

I did a calculation one time and IIRC my home desktop/NAS has several times more storage than every IBM PC/AT ever sold combined.

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eskeu@reddit

I remember upgrading from a 10MB HDD to a 100MB HDD and thought I'd never need a bigger drive, ever!

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DonkeyTron42@reddit

I hope you're backing up your Seagate Exos drive or running in a RAID configuration. We have many and those drives by far have the highest failure rate. I have seen a drive that bad since the IBM Deathstar.

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ronmanfl@reddit

Backblaze disagrees with you.
Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024

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DonkeyTron42@reddit

The 16TB drives are still too new to have hit the point where they start having high failure rates. If you look at the older ones, they're the highest by far.

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555-Rally@reddit

Moving from 24x 10TB WD reds (shucked passports) no failures from 2019 to 24x 24TB exos refurbs in a new chassis. I really hope it works out, but this is why we have zfs.

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DonkeyTron42@reddit

We probably have about 100 Exos drives running under heavy workload 24x7 and they start to drop off after about 3 years. HGST and WD Gold/Enterprise have been much more reliable.

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555-Rally@reddit

IBM deathstar was the fastest 7200rpm drive on the planet at the same time, and I had a few of them. They did all die eventually, but not out of the box.

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Er_Lord_Shizu@reddit

The LT Kernal 5mb hard drive for the c64 was $969 in 1987. Never saw one in person or knew anyone who had one.

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555-Rally@reddit

My first was an XT clone with a 20MB seagate. First machine was a Vic20, I skipped the atari and c64 somehow. I know exactly what you mean though - it was a solitary thing to have a hard disk early on.

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DisastrousAd2335@reddit

I remember when storagge was $500 for a 40MB hdd!!

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jsfarmer@reddit

I wish someone would just graph the las 8-10 years. Decreases... then almost nada.

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555-Rally@reddit

In 1991...that's a 286? maybe an XT?.... 20-60MB MFM (not even IDE) HDD. You still had IRQ and DMA channels to set with jumpers on ISA cards in most PC's, some EISA and 386 had PCI? I can't remember.

20MB was pretty standard HDD. and 1-2MB of ram (simms not dimms). VGA was barely a thing in a 286 PC, mice were serial ports not USB, keyboards were full 12 pin din barrel jacks. 5.25" floppy was how you did things, 386 got the 3.5".

Seagate MFM 20MB had a green light on the front of the 5.25" bay it filled. Took a full 4 pin molex plug, spun at 3600rpm and you had to enter the number of sectors and size of them into the bios to get it to be recognized before formatting. Plug and play did not exist.

1991 predates most internet users (just college campuses), we were using BBS's at the time 14.4k iirc for a 286 era, 56k modems weren't until I was out of highschool, and then the DSL was becoming a thing...compuserve and aol were a long way away from this - we drooled over isdn and T1's for BBS's that had interconnects to universities...adsl wasn't even a thing.

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bgier@reddit

I remember the thrill of being able to copy an ENTIRE CD to a hard drive. In 1997, the department I worked in, bought a combo unit that housed a 2x CD-R drive AND a 1GB hard drive. The brand was APS and the device cost us big (I don't remember how We used it to house our Mac build images and burn them to CDs for remote users. Check out this catalog from 1995 - https://vintageapple.org/catalogs/pdf/APS_Technologies_1995.pdf

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Stephen_Dann@reddit

My first PC, 8086 processor, 640Kb ram. £ 1050, included a free upgrade from a 20mb HD to a 30mb HD that was £200 a couple of months before

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halmcgee@reddit

Sounds like my Leading Edge. Mine only came with 512k RAM and I spent $100 for a 128k chip to upgrade. My choices were 20/30/40 Mb hard drives and at the time I thought how would you ever fill a 40 Mb hard drive? My modem choices were 120 or 300 baud. I went with the 300 baud.

I still remember having to set sectors, cylinders and heads in the BIOS to get the motherboard to properly recognize a new hard drive. Even had to move jumpers around as well.

I had a senior moment when I saw the first Tb USB stick or maybe SD card.

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Psdyekick@reddit

What's an order of magnitude among friends?

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WWWVWVWVVWVVVVVVWWVX@reddit

It's crazy those 18TB drives are $250 now. I bought 4 of them early last year for $170/each. They shot up after that LTT video.

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DramaticErraticism@reddit

What's funny is in 1995 I was laughing at how much more space I could fit on my computer, when in 1985 it would cost a fortune.

I guess everything changes and our perspective is fleeting.

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vawlk@reddit

lol, around that time I had back surgery and I had BBS running xzotics bbs which was just another telegard clone like Renegade. I ran desqview so we could run 2 lines.

I had a hospital bed with a computer on each side and 2 keyboard on my lap. BBS on the left, personal computer on the right.

I was in heaven.

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mulletarian@reddit

Is it just me or has the price on harddrives flattened out in the last ten years

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PC509@reddit

They dropped big time a few years back due to market saturation, etc.. But, with environmental issues in Asia, some plants had problems and then the market corrected itself and prices came back up. For a while there, they were dirt cheap.

Even with that, I think some drives are still coming down. At least where you can get more capacity for a similar cost.

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Karfedix_of_Pain@reddit

I was first getting into computers in the '90s... I used to spend hours ogling the hardware at swap-meets or leafing through catalogs. I still have $1/MB firmly lodged in my brain even though that hasn't been accurate in ages.

My first thought when I'm looking at storage these days is always holy fuck that's going to be expensive... Followed very closely by oh, no, it's cheap now.

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Fitz_2112b@reddit

I was slinging video games at Electronics Boutique in the mall back when Win95 came out. If I remember correctly, a 16 MEGABYTE (not giga) RAM upgrade was around $300-$400 at the time.

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haveutriedareboot@reddit

18 TB used to equal just 30 pieces of flair in the good ole days

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haksaw1962@reddit

Drives cost $300, they just get bigger with each iteration.

Also, how long does it take to format a 1 GB drive in DOS 5.1?

17hr 37minutes

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ob12_99@reddit

I remember purchasing my first IDE hard drive, after running MFM and SCSI drives. It was 60 MB in size and I think I paid just over a K for it at the time from a shop.

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The_Sad_In_Sysadmin@reddit

I was using 1.44 mb floppy disks in college; one day I went to the book store and they had the coolest thing I had ever seen, a USB storage device with 128 mb of storage, all on one tiny little thumb sized thing. I paid my $200 and saved a dozen disks worth of data on it. It was so worth the $1.50+ per megabyte.

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