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advancements in storage technology.

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hargle

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Thought this was kinda cool. Just recently extracted this beast of a hard drive from an old machine. It's one of the smallest, yet biggest hard drives I have.* Then I decided to see it up against the smallest, yet biggest storage device I own.

IMG_0795.jpg


That's a Seagate Wren 2, 80MB hard drive, built in 1990.
Sitting on top of it is an 8GB micro SD stick, built sometime in 2008 I'd guess.

*I do have a 40mb drive that is the same size, but it's not nearly as monolithic looking as the seagate, so the image wasn't as stark.
 
Yes, I too was recently comparing storage sizes. I thought 4GB SDHC vs. 880KB 3.5" DD floppy was impressive, but then I got a MicroSD and compared 8GB MicroSDHC vs. 90KB SDSS 5¼" floppies. It's shocking. Storage technology is probably the biggest advancement in computing (along with CPU). Graphics resolution, ease of use and speed of OS during actual use (user experience) hasn't improved nearly as much. Quality of input devices (keyboard) has actually gone down.
 
Storage has been getting too small; don't manufacturers want people to buy multiple SD cards and thus have to label each card?
 
It's just AMAZING how things have progressed!My first PC HD was 320MB and I thought that when I got my first 1 GB HD that I'd NEVER fill that sucker up.Of course that happened a lot faster than I figured it would.(Sigh)
cgrape2
 
P7262877.jpg


Heh heh...

I remember back in 2000 when a 20gb drive was nuts (and five years earlier, two gigs was just as awesome) and yet here we are now with multi-terabyte desktop computers.
 
I still have one of those Wrens running in a 386 box. It has a CDC sticker on it (they sold their storage operation to Seagate sometime in the 80's).
It still works just fine.

Okay, who wants to see a photo of my Shugart SA4008 - 14" of winchester goodness and all of 40 MB? (It seemed huge at the time). The lights dim when it's powered on.
 
Smallest, but biggest...

Smallest, but biggest...

That's not the winner, though. I've got a Tandon, full height 5mb. HD from the early to mid 80s. I don't think it's ever been used, either. :)
hargle said:
Thought this was kinda cool. Just recently extracted this beast of a hard drive from an old machine. It's one of the smallest, yet biggest hard drives I have.* Then I decided to see it up against the smallest, yet biggest storage device I own.

IMG_0795.jpg


That's a Seagate Wren 2, 80MB hard drive, built in 1990.
Sitting on top of it is an 8GB micro SD stick, built sometime in 2008 I'd guess.

*I do have a 40mb drive that is the same size, but it's not nearly as monolithic looking as the seagate, so the image wasn't as stark.
Click to expand...
 
Stone said:
That's not the winner, though. I've got a Tandon, full height 5mb. HD from the early to mid 80s. I don't think it's ever been used, either. :)
Click to expand...

Pics or it didn't happen!

No, largest I had were the ST-412's. Noisiest and just as big an IBM 9 GB SCSI.
 
I would like to see it.

The largest (size wise) HDs I have are some 8GB seagate 5.25" FH drives that were used in very old AVID systems. I also have some small (under 100mb) 5.25" HH drives that were in Apple Mac II's before they switched to 3.5" drives.

Out of curiosity are the old 14" drives worth more as working relics or scrap (must be quite a bit of metal in there)? Did most of those drives end up as razor blades by now?
 
That's a broken attachment.

Yeah storage space has increased, now I'd like to see a 2.88MB floppy with a 2TB SD card on top.
 
Ok, here's a dec RK05 (14" disk) 1.6MW (12 bit words). It's 10.5" tall and mounted in a 19" rack. It weighs 110 lbs. The tiny blue thing on top is a sony memory stick, now available up to 32GB.

The trained eye will spot the equally voluminous RA80 at the bottom of the next rack over to the left. It's 100MB and even heavier than the RK05. I had to use a car jack to get it into the rack.

Lou
 

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Okay, I thought I'd throw this one in. Pictured is a 1.44MB floppy, with a 32MB MM card on it and on top of that is the head from a CDC 808 disk drive--a monster with 4 spindles and two hydraulically operated head assemblies placed between them, so a single actuator moves the head assemblies for two spindles. The thing stands about 7 feet high. The disk platters themselves are about 3 feet in diameter.

Each head reads or writes 6 bits in parallel (look closely at the thead), so a pair of heads connected to an actuator reads and writes 12 bits at one time. The entire unit, all 4 spindles holds about 132M 6-bit characters, organized in sectors of 644 6-bit bytes.

6638.jpg

But for drum storage, this was the fastest and largest drive that CDC had, circa 1965.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I still have one of those Wrens running in a 386 box. It has a CDC sticker on it (they sold their storage operation to Seagate sometime in the 80's).
It still works just fine.

Okay, who wants to see a photo of my Shugart SA4008 - 14" of winchester goodness and all of 40 MB? (It seemed huge at the time). The lights dim when it's powered on.
Click to expand...

Chuck would you be so kind and post pictures of the SA4008 or any hard drive that is 8" or 14". There arn't many pics out there of these! I video of the lights going dim with sound would be a bonus if you feel like it. :cool:
 
I'll put it on my list to dig out this week and I'll snap a few photos of it. I haven't powered it up in a few years, so no telling what might or might not work now.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I'll put it on my list to dig out this week and I'll snap a few photos of it. I haven't powered it up in a few years, so no telling what might or might not work now.
Click to expand...

Cool. I actually have a hard drive collection myself and plan to make a special "hard drive showcaser device". I realize a person can get carried away with this stuff :eek: . Some of my 5 1/4 MFM drives: 3 seagate 20 megs, 1 NEC 40meg, 1 miniscribe 20meg, 1 IBM 10 meg, 1 seagate 60meg RLL, 1 Priam 40meg and 1 seagate 30meg that has exposed circuitry boards on the top and looks delicate.
 
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