Quicksand Fans

My first computer drive held 128k of data on what was called a floppy disk. In about an hour I am expecting delivery of a drive with a capacity of 14T. They are physically about the same size. I just did a calculation that shows the capacity between the two has expanded by a little more than 109 MILLION times. And the new drive cost about half what the floppy drive did back in 1982.

I was born in 1982.

The first time Inremember paying attention to it the hard drive in our family PC (holy crap, only ONE PC for the entire family?!?!) was 200MB, that would've been mid 90's.

A few months ago I helped a friend spec out a new gaming machine. It only has 3TB of storage total, but one TB of that is on a Seagate Firecuda. Reads/Writes at about 5GB/s. Oh, and it's the size of Thumb drive...... No cables, no mounts, just plugs into PCI-E slot. Practical and pretty at the same time if you're doing a window tower with lighting.

Mynock wrote:I was born in 1982.

The first time Inremember paying attention to it the hard drive in our family PC (holy crap, only ONE PC for the entire family?!?!) was 200MB, that would've been mid 90's.

A few months ago I helped a friend spec out a new gaming machine. It only has 3TB of storage total, but one TB of that is on a Seagate Firecuda. Reads/Writes at about 5GB/s. Oh, and it's the size of Thumb drive...... No cables, no mounts, just plugs into PCI-E slot. Practical and pretty at the same time if you're doing a window tower with lighting.

“Only” 3TB of storage? On something the size of a thumb drive? Has the storage capabilities really gone up so much to make that high of an amount look tiny? Here I was thinking that the roughly 1TB of storage for my laptop was still a rather high amount of storage.

Then again, my laptop is around five years old or so at the time of this post, so maybe it’s just me.

H-Less Perv Side wrote:

Mynock wrote:I was born in 1982.

The first time Inremember paying attention to it the hard drive in our family PC (holy crap, only ONE PC for the entire family?!?!) was 200MB, that would've been mid 90's.

A few months ago I helped a friend spec out a new gaming machine. It only has 3TB of storage total, but one TB of that is on a Seagate Firecuda. Reads/Writes at about 5GB/s. Oh, and it's the size of Thumb drive...... No cables, no mounts, just plugs into PCI-E slot. Practical and pretty at the same time if you're doing a window tower with lighting.

“Only” 3TB of storage? On something the size of a thumb drive? Has the storage capabilities really gone up so much to make that high of an amount look tiny? Here I was thinking that the roughly 1TB of storage for my laptop was still a rather high amount of storage.

Then again, my laptop is around five years old or so at the time of this post, so maybe it’s just me.

I think the 3T figure was for the entire machine and 1T was for a thumb (or something the size of a thumb drive). For what its worth my editing machine, also used to access the archives, varies according to what I have turned on but at times the total is a little more than one tenth of a petabyte.

Fred is correct. The FireCuda was 1TB, the other two TB were on a traditional HDD (Might have been a Western Digital Black?).

Gamers like myself have far lower storage requirements than somebody like Fred, who is editing/archieving thousands of hours of HD movie files, but it's still something you have to take into consideration. Like all other software games have drastically expanded in size over the years as graphics have improved.

Great example: the original iteration of ID Software's Doom (1993) had a total file size of about 3MB. The newest sequel Doom Eternal is 75GB. That's 25,000x the size of the original game.

Mynock wrote:Fred is correct. The FireCuda was 1TB, the other two TB were on a traditional HDD (Might have been a Western Digital Black?).

Gamers like myself have far lower storage requirements than somebody like Fred, who is editing/archieving thousands of hours of HD movie files, but it's still something you have to take into consideration. Like all other software games have drastically expanded in size over the years as graphics have improved.

Great example: the original iteration of ID Software's Doom (1993) had a total file size of about 3MB. The newest sequel Doom Eternal is 75GB. That's 25,000x the size of the original game.

One of the reasons so much storage is needed is I have two copies of everything. That is, everything is on at lest two different physical drives. There are two drives each for offloaded footage, finished product, the earlier archives, later archives, and stills. The smallest of those drives is 5T and the largest is 14T, And that is just one of four computers.

I've been thinking about putting a RAID 1 array in my next machine but even if I do I'll still back up to an external drive regularly.