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modern storage is crazy

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james_s:

--- Quote from: eugene on April 28, 2022, 01:45:23 am ---I suppose the OP is looking for some 4MB memory cards too.  :-DD

Just kidding around; I totally get his frustration. Ten years ago I bought a Synology NAS and stuffed two 2TB drives into it (RAID 1.) I thought 2 TB was ridiculous at the time and I was right; the drive is still only half full. The really sad thing is that the drives are 5.25". If one of them fails I'm not sure I could even find a replacement!

--- End quote ---

You could replace them both with a matched set of newer drives, you could probably get 2 or even 4TB drives for next to nothing and it would be worth it just for the power savings over 5.25" drives.

tszaboo:
Last time I checked few years ago, a 256GB SSD was like 30 dolaridoos. I guess precision milled metal costs more than some puny chips in a green board.

SeanB:
Still got a 8M Sony Memory Stick, and a 32M Nokia branded SD card. Also some 512M SD cards, and a few boxes of old IDE and SATA drives, all sub 1G, with most of them still working, at least they did pass SMART full scan with no errors. Failed ones were stripped, and went to scrap metal, and I have a nice collection of magnets on the fridge, useful for many applications, including using to operate reed switches at a distance, and holding down the GPS in the car, so that I can easily remove it.

SpacedCowboy:
When I got my first computer, at 12, it came as components and a bare PCB. It was a Xmas present (together with a b&w, dial-tuned portable TV which I thought was awesome). After 3 months of watching TV in my bedroom, and swearing it was just as good as the one everyone shared downstairs! My parents started getting antsy about me not doing anything about the "computer" they'd bought me. We weren't well-off (my dad was a docker in Liverpool in the UK, and we lived in a 2-up/2-down terraced house in one of the less--wonderful parts of town, but they did their damndest to get me everything they thought was important, and it didn't matter to me that the TV was second-hand...)

So, off to the shed in the back yard, built it all up - young innocent me thought this was a tough thing to do, all that soldering of chips... These days it's 0201 or bust, but I digress. The thing eventually worked, and I plugged it into my TV, and typed in the famous example in the manual.


--- Code: ---PRINT 1 + 1 = 2
--- End code ---

Which of course printed '1' since 1+1 does equal 2. All elated, I summoned parents-mine to the bedroom to show them, and my dad took one look at the screen, grumbled "I knew it, he's buggered it" and left the room. It took me about a week to convince him that the computer was working perfectly... :-DD

Anyway, that got me hooked on computing, and I spent a year or so saving up for a *colour* one. Come next Xmas, Atari were doing a fire-sale at Dixons, and you could get a computer, with a floppy disk drive, not a tape-deck for £120. I had about £100 by then, but persuaded my nan to pitch in as that year's Xmas present. That disk drive could store 127 KB, which was *enormous*

That computer lasted me about 5 years, and just before I went to college, I bought the (at the time) state of the art Atari-ST as an upgrade. This thing had 1MB of RAM!!! Who could ever use that much ? And the floppy drive it came with could store 720 KB, and the user interface was amazing. That computer got me through college, GFA basic was (heh) basically amazing at writing simple little programs to for example simulate heat dispersing through a cube (I was reading Physics) and the black-and-white "hi-res" monitor that gave you 640x480 was really sharp and precise. 

About a year in, I bought my first ever hard disk, squandering a fair chunk of my student grant and consigning myself to ramen for a few months - it had a whopping 10MB on it. I could have gone for the cheaper 5MB one, but by this point I was savvy, so I knew that was just a trap and bought the seemingly-too-large one instead. I still remember using Signum to create lab-reports, and although it took about 30 minutes to print, and made a hell of a racket on the dot-matrix printer for the entire time, I remain convinced that my "pretty-as-hell" lab-reports contributed significantly to my overall lab grade. I took as much lab as I could...

So yeah, as I sit here using my Mac Studio Ultra on three 4K monitors, with enormous storage on tap over a network-speed I could never have dreamed of, things (and not just storage) have indeed changed :)

eugene:
Would there be any point in the drive manufacturers offering built in RAID? Instead 10TB it might be 2TB with built in RAID 6. It's true you would not be able to swap a single platter if there's a failure, but it would allow you to recover all of the data and put it on a new unit.

Wouldn't help if most failures are controller related. There's probably a solution for that too, but it might be a subject for a different thread....

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