This morning I started using a new mbp as a replacement to my previously aging hardware. As with any anticipated upgrade, I am taking my time to complete the transfer. First, necessary applications and data, then secondary stuff. As I run out of "things I need" I am ready to start copying over the "things I want/love" data. (Movies, Photos, Music, Random Documents, etc.)
Before putting a value on that data, I noticed I am up to about 50Gb of usage. That is OS, Applications, minimum data, etc.
20 Years ago I remember sitting next to my high school buddy. He told me, "you can't install that program, my hard drive is full." To this day I remember thinking, "how on earth could you fill a 10mb hard drive?! I just wanted 512kb of it!" (And according to DIR there were 0bytes free on this drive.)
how on earth could you fill a 10mb hard drive?! I just wanted 512kb of it!
That's still a 20th which sounds like quite a lot to me
Most of my documents are over 10MB each now (darn microsoft).
I have to admit I am really looking forward to the technological advances we will have over my lifetime, thinking of how much things have changed in the last 20 years, I can't wait to see what happens in the next 20!
Yeah it blows my mind to. Remember the plastic boxes for your floppies? (I could go back further but I don't want this to turn into another "you were lucky, when I were a lad we'd dream of living in cardboard box" thread).
I now have about 6TB of external drives and think nothing of it.
Yeah it blows my mind to. Remember the plastic boxes for your floppies?
Love the floppies But I can't really remember using anything smaller than the 1.44MBs though. Every so often I send people floppies with the documents on them that they have requested. The responses I get back can be quite amusing - naff all people have floppy drives now (especially not on their laptops).
I now have about 6TB of external drives and think nothing of it.
I probably have something like that but most of it is in 40GB Maxtor drives ;D
As I don't store lots of videos, the biggest chunk (about 40GB) of my drives I use is music so I can manage fine without a lot of storage.
We're rapidly approaching the point when it'll be feasible for an mp3 player to have enough capacity to carry a non-repeating soundtrack for your entire life. You'd be able to buy an mp3 player, fill it up and give it to your newborn child and they'd never hear the same song twice.
We're rapidly approaching the point when it'll be feasible for an mp3 player to have enough capacity to carry a non-repeating soundtrack for your entire life. You'd be able to buy an mp3 player, fill it up and give it to your newborn child and they'd never hear the same song twice.
Are we?
I'd be interested to see that worked out. I suppose you're considering the storage space of a hard drive.
Lets work it out...
128kbps is 16kBps and life expectancy around 90 or so in a few years.
90 years = 2.84012334 × 10^9 seconds
2.84012334 × 10^9 *16 = 45 441 973 440kB
45 441 973 440 kilobytes = 42.3211357 terabytes
So - There are 5TB single hard drives now, yeah we're getting close
westfw:
13 billion songs, eh? ARE there that many?
No way there are that many worth listening to
There are that many but I will agree, not that many worth listening to. But the other thing is, new songs are written all the time - over the english speaking countries, I bet there are enough songs written to satisfy 'a new one each 3.5 minutes'.
retrolefty:
It's a fail. If you only have time to listen to one song at a time, how will you ever know which ones are your favorites?
I can't say this would be a very practical thing to do
The first hard drives I used were back in my professional Apple II days, these big, noisy, voice coil 5Mbyte Western Digital unit.
About the size of a breadbox! They were soooo loud you had to have them in another room!
They interfaced to the Apple II's with 50 way ribbon cable, I ran miles of the stuff in schools, offices and factories.
It cost around AUS$4000.
Then Corvus bought out a system with a 10Mbyte drive that used twisted pair, that made life easier and a bit quieter.
It cost around AUS$2500.
A while later IBM went from PC to XT and we had the joys of MFM (Manual Format Mayhem/Madness)
Remember running DEBUG, executing the bit of code on the controller card to format a 5M drive?
I got by for ages with my Mac Plus having only a 20M or 40M harddrive, tons of floppy backups!
Now my Mac Plus has a 320M drive!
The other day I bought a couple of 32Gbyte SD cards for AUS$60 each!
SDXC cards a coming, they are going to be 2Tbyte!!
Now when I'm going through the rather large collection of SD cards I have, every gadget I have uses them, I keep thinking of those little coloured, square "disks" you used to see Spock using in Star Trek.
What I ultimately want isn't more space, but more reliability for the space I have. Or a more reliable backup system that doesn't cost an arm-n-leg.
Last year, I had my fileserver die on me; I managed to recover all the data (nothing lost), but I had to migrate to a new set of drives. Sometime this year, I plan on migrating to a new box entirely. I've been thinking about buying a 1-2 Tb hard drive for backup purposes...
None of this makes any sense to me; if they weren't so expensive, a few large SSDs might be perfect (ok, they're not really that expensive, compared to what I remember spending for a 1 gig bigfoot drive back in the day!), but their long-term longevity hasn't been proven, AFAIK...
I just want a solution that I can put the data on, move it around, and not have to worry about -ever- losing it (short of a major catastrophy); the closest thing available that I can come up with is some form of RAID'd NAS, and even that's not foolproof...
I'm not saying I have an alternative beyond writing to tape or burning DVD's and Bluray (I'm still the only one I know with a Bluray burner), but I keep telling my clients,
BACKING UP TO MEDIA THAT HAS THE SAME RELIABILITY AS THE MEDIA YOU ARE BACKING UP IS NOT A BACK UP,
IT IS A COPY!
I keep getting asked to get my "magic wand" out to recover so called back up drives.
Seriously, for photographs and video, burn it to disk! Or write it to tape!
At least twice!
You can always recreate code, go buy that CD again, download application notes or whatever,
but for important stuff like photo's, video, your thesis,
But I can't really remember using anything smaller than the 1.44MBs though. Every so often I send people floppies with the documents on them that they have requested. The responses I get back can be quite amusing - naff all people have floppy drives now (especially not on their laptops).
