Red Hill Hardware Guide. A recommended read. Ad free site as well. Can't beat that.
Warning: it may bring back some tearful, painful and agonizing memories of hard drives that have long since passed away. I will not be held responsible for any heartache caused. If you have lost many a loved hard drive, please proceed with some degree of trepidation. On the other hand, you may be warmed with good memories and encouraged to see how far the world of hard drives has come. Gotta love (or hate) those golden oldies.
A Trip Down Hard Drive Memory Lane & Other Pathways
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Nice one, the guy certainly has a passion for it...
My first hard drive experience was an 850mb unit in the Windows 95 era, or just over 800mb formatted. The super-expensive monstrosity of the time was a 2.5gb Seagate I think. At least the performance-to-capacity ratio was vastly superior to a modern platter drive (ie how long it takes to format, or to transfer the contents of a full drive).
Still, I've often wondered how the younger guys who 'need' multiple terrabytes in their systems would cope going back to a '90s system like my Pentium 100Mhz.
My first hard drive experience was an 850mb unit in the Windows 95 era, or just over 800mb formatted. The super-expensive monstrosity of the time was a 2.5gb Seagate I think. At least the performance-to-capacity ratio was vastly superior to a modern platter drive (ie how long it takes to format, or to transfer the contents of a full drive).
Still, I've often wondered how the younger guys who 'need' multiple terrabytes in their systems would cope going back to a '90s system like my Pentium 100Mhz.
That website was a good find. Didn't realise it was Australian at first (web address should have been a giveaway...). Lots of other info there which I enjoyed as much as the hard drive articles. The motherboards page was just as insightful and worth the read.
I can't remember exactly what size drives I used in the 80s and early 90s; they certainly would have been less than 80MB. From 80MB drives, I think I moved up to 250MB (mid 90s) then a massive leap to 1.2GB (late 90s) then an even greater leap to 40GB (2002). I used the 40GB for six years before having to deal with modern high capacity SATA drives. I retired it earlier this year. It's hard to say goodbye to those trusty old PATA drives. It'll never be the same again withous those grey flat ribbon cables (or fancy coloured round cables, if you ever used them).
From 40GB I moved on to 640GB, retrogressed to 160GB and took the great leap "forward" to a 1TB drive (didn't think I would ever own one). I have no real need for any drive over 320GB, let alone 1TB. But the price difference is so minimal that I may as well get the higher capacity one. Time will tell whether the value is worth the hassle of formatting and maintaining the drives. It takes several hours to fully format a 1TB drive and perhaps even days to secure erase depending on which method you use.
This will probably be solved down the track (I'm not an early adopter) with a smallish SSD (40-80GB) to use as a system drive plus a larger drive for storage. I might even end up selling the 640GB and 1TB one day and just get two 500GBs. I think capacity will just get higher and higher. There's no other way for desktop drives to market themselves. The majority of people don't care about silence, a few watts saving is negligible to the electricity bill for switch on/switch off home users and performance is mostly a non factor as most drives are good enough for most users these days.
Maybe it's time for a DOS revival so we can put those 80MB golden oldies and sub 100MHz systems to use again.
I can't remember exactly what size drives I used in the 80s and early 90s; they certainly would have been less than 80MB. From 80MB drives, I think I moved up to 250MB (mid 90s) then a massive leap to 1.2GB (late 90s) then an even greater leap to 40GB (2002). I used the 40GB for six years before having to deal with modern high capacity SATA drives. I retired it earlier this year. It's hard to say goodbye to those trusty old PATA drives. It'll never be the same again withous those grey flat ribbon cables (or fancy coloured round cables, if you ever used them).
From 40GB I moved on to 640GB, retrogressed to 160GB and took the great leap "forward" to a 1TB drive (didn't think I would ever own one). I have no real need for any drive over 320GB, let alone 1TB. But the price difference is so minimal that I may as well get the higher capacity one. Time will tell whether the value is worth the hassle of formatting and maintaining the drives. It takes several hours to fully format a 1TB drive and perhaps even days to secure erase depending on which method you use.
This will probably be solved down the track (I'm not an early adopter) with a smallish SSD (40-80GB) to use as a system drive plus a larger drive for storage. I might even end up selling the 640GB and 1TB one day and just get two 500GBs. I think capacity will just get higher and higher. There's no other way for desktop drives to market themselves. The majority of people don't care about silence, a few watts saving is negligible to the electricity bill for switch on/switch off home users and performance is mostly a non factor as most drives are good enough for most users these days.
Maybe it's time for a DOS revival so we can put those 80MB golden oldies and sub 100MHz systems to use again.
Well technically my first "computer" was a TI-99/4A, and next after that was a Commodore 64 with a single-side 5 1/4" floppy drive, so I guess my first computer with a storage device was my C-64. The fun fact there was that it only had a single read-write head for the floppy drive, so you could only use one side at a time. Once it filled up, you had to pop out the disk and flip it over, like an old cassette. I think all PC's had dual-side heads, so it could read both sides as a single disk.
Anyway, after that, my dad gave me one of his OLD work machines, a Compaq Portable, which was basically an IBM XT clone with 640mb of memory and a 10mb hard drive. I was about 10 years old when that computer was given to me (which I suppose means it was 5 years old) and thus began the first of many generations of owning a computer until the hard drive filled up and wishing I had more space. That seemed to continue unabated from then until probably 2001. Only by then did it seem like hard drive sizes could keep ahead of the rate at which I was buying games.
Now, with how much smaller SSD's are than magnetic drives, I may once again find myself delving into a cycle of having more data than I can store on a single hard drive. The biggest problem is my flight simulator - X-Plane - takes up about 75gb for all the super-detailed scenery. That one app alone would overflow from an Intel X-25.
Ahh.. memories! At least one thing is nice: I haven't had to PKZip anything or run a hard drive compression program since my 386 days. Heck, my dad even owned a special add-in card for his 286 that had a processor to offload the disk compression, so it doubled his 20mb hard drive to roughly 40mb compressed with no performance loss, because all the compression/decompression was done by the add-in card that doubled as the hard drive controller card. Best of all, it was far more reliable than software compression since an OS crash didn't corrupt the drive as easily, since the controller card managed all disk writes. It was a slick setup, but to think nowadays of purchasing a $200 card just to offload compression is hillarious. Oh, the things people did back then when hard drives were $500-1000.
Anyway, after that, my dad gave me one of his OLD work machines, a Compaq Portable, which was basically an IBM XT clone with 640mb of memory and a 10mb hard drive. I was about 10 years old when that computer was given to me (which I suppose means it was 5 years old) and thus began the first of many generations of owning a computer until the hard drive filled up and wishing I had more space. That seemed to continue unabated from then until probably 2001. Only by then did it seem like hard drive sizes could keep ahead of the rate at which I was buying games.
Now, with how much smaller SSD's are than magnetic drives, I may once again find myself delving into a cycle of having more data than I can store on a single hard drive. The biggest problem is my flight simulator - X-Plane - takes up about 75gb for all the super-detailed scenery. That one app alone would overflow from an Intel X-25.
Ahh.. memories! At least one thing is nice: I haven't had to PKZip anything or run a hard drive compression program since my 386 days. Heck, my dad even owned a special add-in card for his 286 that had a processor to offload the disk compression, so it doubled his 20mb hard drive to roughly 40mb compressed with no performance loss, because all the compression/decompression was done by the add-in card that doubled as the hard drive controller card. Best of all, it was far more reliable than software compression since an OS crash didn't corrupt the drive as easily, since the controller card managed all disk writes. It was a slick setup, but to think nowadays of purchasing a $200 card just to offload compression is hillarious. Oh, the things people did back then when hard drives were $500-1000.
The first "personal computer" we had in our family was a Commodore 16. It had to be connected to the television via an adaptor as we didn't have a monitor (the C 16 was already a luxury for us). It was pretty much unused most of the time. It came with a keyboard, a platform game on a cartridge and a joystick. You could code instructions into it via the keyboard to create music, shapes, do maths and all kinds of exciting things like that. Safe to say, I never really got into computers until around ten years later when we got a 386SX that I think ran at 40MHz. Played lots of DOS games in those days. Without a sound card or speakers might I add. We just couldn't afford those luxuries in our household in those days. So I had to be content with the PC speaker buzzing and beeping away. Upgrading was expensive. I can't remember how much hard drives and RAM were in those days but it was something like the average working man's weekly (maybe fortnightly) wages. In other words, costly. People did all kinds of tweaks to their .sys and .bat files to gain some kind of added performance in DOS. Windows was frowned upon. I was an ardent DOS man. It was hard to let go of it when moving to Windows XP. But... there comes a time.
Over the years, our house, for one reason or another, became a dumping ground for other persons' used computer junk. I kind of did appreciate it, as I got lots of parts for free that I couldn't afford to buy myself. Things like floppy drives, CD ROM drives, ribbon cables and case screws became quite useful and were salvaged. That's how I learnt (or tried to through trial and error) to build and fix computers. I still keep many of those parts till this day. The CD drives are almost next to useless these days though, as most software comes on DVD. They can still be used for CD extraction if one wanted to do that.
I'm a person who believes that one must know when it's time to move on. Those days bring back worthwhile memories; they also stir up negative ones as well. I would like to simplify my computing, get rid of the obsoleted junk that has accumulated over the years and use computers more to my benefit. At the moment, I'm spending too much time and money diagnosing and fixing hardware and software problems and not enough time on actually using the PC for productivity.
It may be fashionable at this present time to recycle and reuse old parts, but I just couldn't be bothered with it. Not anymore. I will eventually consolidate my computing to just one or two physical systems with as few hardware as possible. I will probably wait at least another year before I invest in an SSD; that will solve my partitioning headaches and simplify my storage setup. Separate drives for storage and backup (external case/s, NAS?) may be my eventual solution. To think this was possible ten or twenty years ago. You would have been considered absolutely crazy.
I tend to be a conservative person. So a lot of this technology and where it's headed is concerning to me. I just take what I require out of it and don't bother with the rest. I'd probably be considered archaic by many, despite being more attuned than the average citizen. I wonder how it'll be, twenty, thirty years from now, when people travel down memory lane and look back at SSDs and 2TB drives and laugh at those ancient computer users who actually used those slow, loud and low capacity things. There may come a time when computers will be reduced to an embedded chip within the person itself, and that will all that will be required to access the worldwide networks where everything is stored online or in the "cloud". It's probably happening already. Something for thought.
Over the years, our house, for one reason or another, became a dumping ground for other persons' used computer junk. I kind of did appreciate it, as I got lots of parts for free that I couldn't afford to buy myself. Things like floppy drives, CD ROM drives, ribbon cables and case screws became quite useful and were salvaged. That's how I learnt (or tried to through trial and error) to build and fix computers. I still keep many of those parts till this day. The CD drives are almost next to useless these days though, as most software comes on DVD. They can still be used for CD extraction if one wanted to do that.
I'm a person who believes that one must know when it's time to move on. Those days bring back worthwhile memories; they also stir up negative ones as well. I would like to simplify my computing, get rid of the obsoleted junk that has accumulated over the years and use computers more to my benefit. At the moment, I'm spending too much time and money diagnosing and fixing hardware and software problems and not enough time on actually using the PC for productivity.
It may be fashionable at this present time to recycle and reuse old parts, but I just couldn't be bothered with it. Not anymore. I will eventually consolidate my computing to just one or two physical systems with as few hardware as possible. I will probably wait at least another year before I invest in an SSD; that will solve my partitioning headaches and simplify my storage setup. Separate drives for storage and backup (external case/s, NAS?) may be my eventual solution. To think this was possible ten or twenty years ago. You would have been considered absolutely crazy.
I tend to be a conservative person. So a lot of this technology and where it's headed is concerning to me. I just take what I require out of it and don't bother with the rest. I'd probably be considered archaic by many, despite being more attuned than the average citizen. I wonder how it'll be, twenty, thirty years from now, when people travel down memory lane and look back at SSDs and 2TB drives and laugh at those ancient computer users who actually used those slow, loud and low capacity things. There may come a time when computers will be reduced to an embedded chip within the person itself, and that will all that will be required to access the worldwide networks where everything is stored online or in the "cloud". It's probably happening already. Something for thought.