Computer drive sizes over the years

a year ago by Ms. ArmoredThirteen to c/mildlyinteresting

I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!

Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.

So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.

SolidShake 104 points a year ago

And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra

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warm 70 points a year ago

Their customers buy it, so they arent changing that

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SolidShake -23 points a year ago

You've never shopped for a MacBook before I take it.

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SkunkWorkz 22 points a year ago

You’ve never met a pro user who loves Apple products before have you? They just buy the upgrades they need (and more) without blinking an eye. Since it’s a business expense anyway, the $2000 in upgrades is a rounding error when the machine will be used for several years.

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KoalaUnknown 15 points a year ago

1tb macbook user here. I have and I can confirm it to be true.

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nullPointer 21 points a year ago

lack of education is Apple's bread and butter.

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ILikeBoobies 4 points a year ago

That’s Windows users, Apple at least has to make it difficult for users to install something else

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Decq 17 points a year ago

Apple livea on the notion of 'a fool and his money are soon parted' and can you blame them? They are one of, if not the, most profitable companies around. If it works why change it.

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nef 12 points a year ago

To their credit as of 4 years ago all their devices come with high-speed SSDs, the issue is they charge 5x market price for storage and RAM size upgrades.

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nonentity 93 points a year ago

5MB of storage in 1956.

5MB storage in 1956

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Sabin10 24 points a year ago

That would hold 1.66 copies of war and peace.

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qjkxbmwvz 22 points a year ago

ASCII wasn't around then, so it would perhaps be stored in 5-bit ITA2, or 6/7-bit FIELDATA. So likely a 5/8 to 7/8 space savings (unless the numbers are for compressed War and Peace).

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WillFord27 14 points a year ago

They could've just compressed it using 7zip. Text files compress really small!

/j

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tetris11 13 points a year ago

A space ship descends and lands outside my door, and and a benevolent Alien pops out and hands me a 512 MB USB stick.

"I crafted this for your species, and made sure it's compatible with your hardware standards. It contains the sum total knowledge of all life in the universe and can be used to accelerate your species to the next plane of existence."

I thank him tearfully and he departs with a warm smile, ascending back up into the soon-to-be-knowable cosmos from when he came.

I plug the stick into my machine, and check out the directory. Inside are two files:

 105 MB   knowledge.tar.piidx
 328 KB   README.txt

I open up the readme file to learn more about the PIIDX file format so that I can uncompress the sum total knowledge of all existence. General gist:

Uses a compression algorithm with an infinite dictionary based on prime numbers
Uses a storage/retrieval algorithm based on the digits of Pi

Realise quickly that the file will never be opened in my lifetime

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Imgonnatrythis 8 points a year ago

Once you have one copy on there it would be awfully wasteful to fill the rest up with a 0.66 copy though.

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the_trash_man 4 points a year ago

You could probably store more in a filing cabinet with paper

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Dicska 3 points a year ago

Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller...

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MudMan 43 points a year ago

Wait, 1tb?

You're leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.

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fuckwit_mcbumcrumble 45 points a year ago

Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we'll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.

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CmdrShepard49 18 points a year ago

And they crap out so quickly. I can't even count the number of SD cards I've had to throw in the trash. I don't think I've ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.

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frezik 4 points a year ago

This is why for retro computers, I tend to prefer CompactFlash. IDE->CF adapters are cheap, and the cards are much higher quality. They effectively become an SSD that works on old stuff. (Just because I like retro computing stuff doesn't mean I want the whole experience, like waiting for disk heads to move, or worse, tape drives to finish reading. I'm old enough that I remember dealing with it and I don't need to deal with it again.)

Not a lot of call for them otherwise, though. SD cards have gotten increasingly good bandwidth, which means they're good enough for a lot of higher end cameras. CF is getting squeezed out.

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Knuschberkeks 2 points a year ago

Invest in Samsung Pro Endurane SD cards, they last a lot longer. I believe Sandisk has a similar product but I have never used it.

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CmdrShepard49 7 points a year ago

There are way too many counterfeit cards mixed in with the legitimate stock out there for me to bother spending too much on any single card. I typically go for the midrange offerings and roll the dice.

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jumping_redditor 1 point a year ago

aside from raspberry pi(s) and phone storage I don't see any significant reason to justify paying for a more durable SD card

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MudMan 8 points a year ago

I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we'll get those for cheap.

In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we're comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I'm gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren't even near the bottom of the specs table.

Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that's because people like simple things more than true things.

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Vinny_93 23 points a year ago

Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.

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atomicbocks 21 points a year ago

There were even smaller hard drives. The iPod used a 1.8in drive.

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Rai -2 points a year ago

But we’re on Lemmy so everything Apple does is bad!

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AwakenedAce 8 points a year ago

What are you talking about this wasn't even Apple's invention, it was used in quite a few devices, it's probably more that people aren't aware of it

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Rai 1 point a year ago

I’m just remaking on the general “Apple is the worst” sentiment I see here. What popular non-Apple device used this hard drive?

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Bebopalouie 15 points a year ago

Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.

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ReluctantMuskrat 3 points a year ago

Same first hard drive I bought! Crazy we both remembered the model number too. Got mine in 1990 so not $800 I don't believe, but regardless it was all I could afford after buying the 8087 math coprocessor too!

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Bebopalouie 2 points a year ago

Forgot about copro. Everyone and their dog had to have it back then.

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bluesheep 9 points a year ago

The left most one is also an HDD? It looks like what I imagine a tape drive would look like but searching for them shows very different results lol

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Routhinator 11 points a year ago

Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.

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Appoxo 2 points a year ago

For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).

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frank_exchange_of_views 8 points a year ago

Kind of hard to see the scale, but the drive that this removable platter would go into, took the full width of a 19" rack.

It once held several megabytes, but now it's a decoration in my office.

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absGeekNZ 8 points a year ago

In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100's of kg range.

Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven't been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.

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Rhaedas 2 points a year ago

"Sitting on top" is a brilliant way to display that.

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absGeekNZ 4 points a year ago

Very effective.

The RAM section with the hand woven memory modules is so awesome. 1kb of RAM; tiny iron rings with fine copper wires threaded through them.

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Aceticon 2 points a year ago

My mother worked in a factory making those things when she was young.

Oh and the wires were gold and hair thin, and they did the whole thing by hand.

This was at some point in the 60s.

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LovableSidekick 7 points a year ago

I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.

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swordgeek 7 points a year ago

I've got a full-height 5 1/4" 1GB hard drive around here. Thing is massive.

I've also got most of the storage devices I've ever used over the decades:

5 1/4" floppy
3 1/2" floppy
4mm DAT tape
8mm DAT tape
1/4" QIC tape
Zip disk
Cassette tape
Punched tape

I'm missing the following:

DLT tape
LTO tape
8" floppy
IBM 2315 disk pack

Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.

EDIT Don't know how I forgot about cartridges (Atari 400 and 2600 - still got em!) and CDROM/DVD/WORM. I have CDROM, DVDROM (in various formats), but no WORM media (i.e. IBM 3363 - a CDROM in a rigid case, before the official CD standard was created).

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Zedd_Prophecy 4 points a year ago

You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn't have auto parking.

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HugeNerd 1 point a year ago

Syquest cartridges.

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myotheraccount 2 points a year ago

Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists

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swordgeek 1 point a year ago

Just a brain fart. I've edited my post to reflect them.

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HugeNerd 1 point a year ago

Magneto-optical. Even better.

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ArmoredThirteen 2 points a year ago

I've actually got a little stack of punch cards. It's a program my dad wrote when he was in college, he gave it to me when I started programming

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umbraroze 1 point a year ago

Off the top of my mind, stuff that I've used and still have lying around:

5.25" floppies (DSDD, Commodore 64; I think I may have a few HD floppies for PC but I'm not sure if I have a drive for them)
3.5" floppies (HD and some DD, mostly for PC; I have a few PC carcasses that have floppy drives, but I do also have a working USB floppy drive)
Cassette tapes (Spectravideo, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64)
ROM cartridges (same as above, plus game consoles)
Iomega Zip (not sure if the Zip floppies I have have anything relevant; the USB Zip drive is in box somewhere)
Iomega Jaz (two disks; not sure if the drive I was actually working last time I used it, could be completely hosed by now, Iomega didn't exactly have a good reputation)
A few IDE/PATA hard drives (not sure of the condition)
Bunch of CD/DVD/rewritables, I think I have a few unused CD-Rs/DVD-Rs too, never had a Blu-Ray drive for computers
USB sticks and hard drives of various descriptions
microSD cards used with Raspberry Pi

Funny thing is, I think I have no extra SATA hard drives and modern SSDs lying around, because most of the computers I have that use them are still in operation.

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swordgeek 1 point a year ago

I didn't consider hard drives (spinning rust or SSD) because they're generally internal/permanent devices. (although I do have a SATA dock sitting on my desk.)

Hmm. It gets more complicated the more I think about it.

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CmdrShepard49 7 points a year ago

Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they're getting this small.

I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they're all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.

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thermal_shock 12 points a year ago

2280 seems to be the most common DIY size, 2230 is common for business machines, sometimes in an adapter to fit a normal 2.5" HDD bay or a slot large enough for 2280. I just removed one from the 2280 adapter last week to get data off after the storm came through the east coast.

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recked_wralph 37 points a year ago

The fact that those measurements are in inches when “2280” means 22mm x 80mm agitates me.

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thermal_shock 6 points a year ago

Welcome to merica!

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frezik 3 points a year ago

Welcome to everywhere. 3.5" disks in German are called "dreieinhalb Zoll Disketten", and in Dutch "drie punt vijf inch floppys". Both of those translate roughly to "three and a half inch disks/floppies". Everyone borrowed US computer terms and translated them directly.

No country uses the metric system exclusively. None. You will find exceptions if you look for them. This isn't some kind of moral failing, it's just practicality. Look at how car tires are sold for one example that's nearly universal due to industry standards.

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spwyll 4 points a year ago

When the measurement is already in the designation, the only point to adding information is for "translation." It would irk me if someone felt the need to point out a 2280 was 80 mm long while a 2230 was only 30 mm long. I mean it's already in the name...

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trolololol 5 points a year ago

I mean I appreciate the mention or else I wouldn't have learned it

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ikidd 3 points a year ago

There's terabyte SD cards now, that are almost that fast.

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ArmoredThirteen 1 point a year ago

They are more limited in storage space than the 2280s but yeah the thing is tiny, almost 1/3 length even at 30mm. It's literally the size of a postage stamp I'm stunned

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DarrinBrunner 5 points a year ago

I remember all the formats shown.

My first machine was an AST Research 286 16Mhz (in "turbo" mode) with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, and a 40 MB 5-1/4" hard drive. I paid ~$2000 for it in the late 80s. That was a good move, I knew more about computers than most people applying for jobs at the time, and that allowed me to make a decent living without a college degree.

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mudmaniac 2 points a year ago

How to say you are over 50 without saying you are over 50. I'm a A little younger, so in the 90s 20MB drive wasn't $2000. First time I had Ms dos boot from a hdd instead of floppy. The first time I ever 'installed' was f16 fighting falcon. The loading speed was phenomenal for the time.

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taiyang 4 points a year ago

It really is amazing, and just popping an m.2 into a motherboard directly is just so... easy. And I think Gen5s are what, 2.5x faster than what you're showing here?

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MDCCCLV 7 points a year ago

The screw situation is finicky. It's a weird mix between you're supposed to have screws from your case/motherboard or sometimes the drive comes with one. But if you move stuff and drop the tiny tiny screw it's a hassle. Every motherboard should just have the little tab you just turn to keep it in place.

Plus the newer gen fast drives get hot so they need a heatsink. The fastest maybe need heatsink plus airflow. So then you need an extra fan if you don't have enough airflow which is easy because it's flush against the motherboard and sometimes blocked by the GPU.

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taiyang 2 points a year ago

Full agree on the screw situation, although my most recent mobi addressed that with a sort of... turnable plastic lock thing? And a built in heatsink and "shield" for the gen 5 and 4 ports, so I haven't had any issues with heat. I get the sense we'll have a better standard as time goes in though, Gen5 is really really new.

But even the gen 3s are lovely. Maybe I just hate SATA cables, haha.

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Kolanaki 4 points a year ago

It'd be gnar if the smallest one was also a magnetic platter hard drive.

The smallest old style hard drive I can think of is the iPod. But now I want to know if any magnetic platter drives got smaller than that... 🤔

Afaik, it's all been solid state after that. Even newer iPods.

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Mnem667 5 points a year ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

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Kolanaki 2 points a year ago

It's so tiny! 😍

Omg it was made in 1998?! :O

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Mnem667 3 points a year ago

Pulled from my Life drive :)

And further into the article: "Toshiba decided to skip the 1" form factor, and in March 2004 announced a 0.85" drive that shipped in September of the same year.[38] "

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Blackmist 1 point a year ago

I said the real microdrive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Microdrive

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Rai 1 point a year ago

ADORABLE AAAAA

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magnetosphere 4 points a year ago

gnar

You made me think of GWAR

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Kolanaki 3 points a year ago

Gwar is pretty gnar.

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Davel23 1 point a year ago

As far as I'm aware 1.8" is the smallest form factor for mechanical hard drives.

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bdonvr 1 point a year ago

Nope, they did make 0.85" ones. Here's someone taking one apart: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0KdAj54xg

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Imgonnatrythis 1 point a year ago

Oh wow. I didn't even know that was a platter drive! I'm kinda glad I kept that thing.

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jj4211 4 points a year ago

Oldest hard drives I've dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.

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utopiah 4 points a year ago

Meanwhile I'm traveling soon and "packing" microSDs, like... 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It's ridiculous!

I considered buying the 2To ones ... but I don't even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it's to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don't even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.

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nibbler 3 points a year ago

I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge...

I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it's the root of the name "core dump" etc :D

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altima_neo 3 points a year ago

You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.

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Treczoks 3 points a year ago

I think I have two I could put on the left side. A "full-height" 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don't remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.

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stinky 2 points a year ago

what's the one on the right?

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ArmoredThirteen 2 points a year ago

WD_Black SN770M. There are 1/2, 1, and 2tb models I have the 1tb version here. https://www.newegg.com/...

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tgxn 2 points a year ago

It's an M.2 NVMe or sata drive.

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RememberTheApollo_ 2 points a year ago

And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.

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__dev 11 points a year ago

The one on the very right is NVMe.

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Rhaedas 2 points a year ago

Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.

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magnetosphere 2 points a year ago

Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?

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MDCCCLV 3 points a year ago

This is for desktop PC. But the correct answer is overall smaller because if you only had spinny drives a lot of small devices wouldn't be possible.

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dontbelievethis 3 points a year ago

Yes.

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pHr34kY 2 points a year ago

I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.

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ramenshaman 1 point a year ago

The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.

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ILikeBoobies 1 point a year ago

It’s a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago

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Bonesince1997 1 point a year ago

The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).

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Valmond 1 point a year ago

And it will continue...

Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50€.

We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)

path: 0 17978933, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

chunes 1 point a year ago

And they all last until about the same date

path: 0 17978887, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0

stupidcasey -5 points a year ago

Women had it good back then.

path: 0 18001524, hotness: undefined, score: -5, children: 5

ArmoredThirteen 3 points a year ago

I don't understand what you mean could you elaborate?

path: 0 18001524 18002474, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 4

And009 3 points a year ago

T'was big

path: 0 18001524 18002474 18002703, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2

ArmoredThirteen 3 points a year ago

The drives were big?

path: 0 18001524 18002474 18002703 18002937, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1

And009 2 points a year ago

Warm and heavy too, older ones even leak.

path: 0 18001524 18002474 18002703 18002937 18006075, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

Corn 2 points a year ago

Size matters.

path: 0 18001524 18002474 18004603, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0

mildlyinteresting

mildlyinteresting

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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

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mildlyinteresting

mildlyinteresting

@lemmy.world

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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

go to feed...