random musings, progress.. amazing, really.

[Skree]

Just thought i'd maybe post an "interest" post among all the "i cant get this to work" and "what hd should i buy"s

i've been around computers for 20 years.. Can remember having 40mb PC HD's. Back in those days all my bits were used hand me downs though.

IIRC my list of HD's goes: 40mb, 80mb, 120mb, 427mb, 1.2gb, 3.2gb, 4.3gb, 6gb, 15.2gb, 30gb, 80gb x2 or 3, 120gb x2.

The first new HD i ever bought was in 1998/9. a Maxtor 536DX ATA-66 15.2gb unit. Loud and slow. I still have it though in 24/7 use as it has been since day1. This has been an excellent drive. It is used as a solitary HD for a XP2100 MATX system that we browse, word pro, DVD playback etc on. (thank god for LAN networking )

Now, I have 13mbps broadband, and.. well.. You all know what i use this for..

I'm about to order a couple of Samsung Spinpoint 500gb SATA HDs. Total 1000gb. This is for my upcoming storage rig. I intend to get more, but that's all i can afford at the mo. This got me to thinking, In 1998/9 when i bought my 536DX, 1000gb was unthinkable. You'd need 70ish drives. Oh yes and one was £100+ in a BARGAIN sale. New HD's were going on for £10 per gb. The Spinny's i'm looking at are a little over £0.10 per gb

I expect to fill one such drive in about 2/3 months. For someone who started out with a sinclair spectrum with the floppy discs that werent, or tapes, this is amazing - only a few years after we broke the 10gb barrier.. and now i'm talking about 1 or 2 TB as if that was a small amount. To put this into perspective, i'm just going to add drives till i run out of drive bays (10ish) and expect by then to be purchasing 1tb+ HD's in the same sweet pricing spot that 500gb's are in now, before i start removing smaller drives to be replaced by big ones.

I'm not the only one. My mate has about the same storage as me (400gb ish) at the mo and is just as packed full as i am..

10tb is doable now.. Wonder what years 100 and 1000tb will be doable in home type pcs... should be about 2013 and 2018 if current trends are followed..

The same trends go all over pc's... from 8mhz CPU's and 128kb graphics to 2x3+ghz cpu's and 1024mb x2 gfx arrays...

Just thought i'd post this, see if anyone wishes to comment/feels the same/thinks im an old **** lol. - If it makes a couple of kids appreciate modern computers a bit more, my work is done

/salutes Mr Moore

 

[Skree]

yeah games are getting silly in size. The first PC game i ever played, other than solitaire and minesweeper was a DOS game called dopewars, which was 84kb. This game kept me amused for many hundreds, and possibly thousands of hours, and i'd still play it now if i could find the disc lol - I've largely grown out of gaming now, i like to have a mess around on my PS2 but only driving games like GT3 and burnout revenge, and i like to play the games i loved as a child, but its not worth me having an uber graphics card, i dont buy new games.

Who remembers the *noid series where you had a paddle, and a ball and you had to bust blocks? that was the next pc game i got.. came on a cover disc to EasyPC (or it may have been something else.. easypc might have been later, 1994ish) way back when - still have them mags somewhere - my dad bought them in an attempt to keep up with his son but realised he could never match me even at 10yr old (hence why he hates pcs to this day), and i never read them lol

As for leaving stuff on PC's, i find its the best way of storage, because i just dont look after cd/dvd's - i start out with the best intentions but they end up on the floor or behind the bed like my rammstein rosenrot cd - everything i have is on various hard drives, hence why i have no more space (even the laptop is full) and need more...

i want a multiple terrabyte file server
:hard drive fetish-emote-thingy: