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.
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.
And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.
The one on the very right is NVMe.
Oldest hard drives I’ve dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.
Women had it good back then.
I don’t understand what you mean could you elaborate?
Size matters.
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.
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.
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 :-)
I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.
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.
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
For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.
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.
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?
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.
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.
And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra
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.
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.
lack of education is Apple’s bread and butter.
That’s Windows users, Apple at least has to make it difficult for users to install something else
Their customers buy it, so they arent changing that
You’ve never shopped for a MacBook before I take it.
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.
1tb macbook user here. I have and I can confirm it to be true.
And they all last until about the same date
I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.
Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?
Yes.
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.
