1GB - Then and now

[Smeggle]

Blooming eck

1Gb Then and Now

Wow!

[ujay]

Great pic Smeggle, when was the original bit of kit made, d'you know?

Of course, I remember when these things were still clockwork

UJ

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

Originally posted by Smeggle
Blooming eck

1Gb Then and Now

Wow!

Pffft.

[P$ycHo™]

(0.85 inch)

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

http://www.physorg.com/news88874126.html

[Smeggle]

Originally posted by ujay
Great pic Smeggle, when was the original bit of kit made, d'you know?

Of course, I remember when these things were still clockwork

UJ

not sure ujay - came across while stumbling. I'd say it's from a few years back though probably the 60's maybe?

[Vie]

Originally posted by SSJ4 Gogitta
Pffft.

[Image]

[Image]

Trouble with flash mediums smaller than an SD card is there way way way too easy to loose.

One sneeze and you have 5 hours of searching to start.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

One terabyte.

[Canon]

one petabyte

http://www.emc.com/news/images/DMX_3...Dave_72505.jpg

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....35#post2182735




I think I win.


Quick explination: some mathematics showed that on any given day, the amount of data being trafficked on the internet is equal to about 40 petabytes (again, per day). The weight of all the binary "1"s (1's are charged, ie: have electrons. 0's have no charge, ie: no electrons. Electrons have weight) ammount to about the weight of the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-thousandths of an inch across.

My photo of the Lincoln cent with salt on it, the one grain is divided up to segments equal to about two-thousandths of an inch across.

[sgtfuzzbubble011]

"I'll get you yet, Gadget!"

*shakes fist*

[aFfLiCtEd]

How's THIS for a "then and now" comparison with an ipod?

[Jay]

I would think the cassette recorder/player assumed that market. There is nothing portable about vinyl.

[gaekwad2]

There were a few attempts though, including this.

[Omega X]

That GB pic was on Digg.

Someone should find a pic of what a Computer looked like before and after. I'm pretty sure that in the near future, PC towers won't be the norm for desktops.

[ScorLibran]

Punched cards, baby!


Check out these IBM RAMAC platters sharing a single, very overworked read/write head moving up and down a tower service assembly:


The Cray model 1A super computer, serial number 6, from 1976. (For an idea of scale, it's over seven feet tall.)


A hard drive assembly from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), circa 1970. (For an idea of scale, it's over a foot across.)


Here's a whole computer system from fifty years ago: The IBM model 305 RAMAC system, circa 1957. Note the truck-sized hard drive cabinet using the same single-head tower stack from three pics up.


And for an image of a modern computer to compare...well, look in front of you.* The one you're using right now has VASTLY more computing power than did the Apollo spacecraft that took mankind to the moon in 1969. In fact, only ten modern homes like yours likely contain more total computing power than the entire United States Air Force had in the same year. It's difficult to realize just how FAST our computing power grows over time until you live long enough to really experience a good chuck of it. For me, it started as I tinkered around with building rack systems in the late '70s. A gigabyte? That was the realm of, well, the US Air Force. It was around the same time a guy named William was having brighter ideas than me in this industry and sowing the seeds for the biggest financial empire the world's ever known. Damn it.

* - I doubt you're surfing the forum on an Altair, but if you are then please forgive my assumption.

[ujay]

Punched cards, I remember them - 80 bytes a card, that's a hell of a lot to make 1GB.
I also remember dropping a stack down the stairwell and spending the next two hours sorting them into order again.
We got punched tape soon after, much more better.

Not sure if they count as storage, though that's what it was, they were more an input method(no monitors and keyboards in those days).
Mass storage would have been on magnetic tape and quite a respectable capacity.

Strange but true, the very first programs I wrote were run on a machine built by Cray, a CDC6600.
Never got to see it as such, no one was allowed in the same room.
We just got to hang around the line printer and wait.

UJ

[aFfLiCtEd]

I swear that woman sitting at the desk is sporting a mustache.

[cooky560]

amazing how much progress has been made with minimization over the past few decades.

[swingdjted]

Take smeggle's pic and compare the number of hours you have to work to earn enough money for each. That's what suprises me the most.

1GB SD card - I work a few minutes and earn enough money for one.

1GB monster hard drive from way back when - who knows how long it would have taken me to earn enough money for that.

[swingdjted]

I found this interesting... a full terabyte on one SD card:

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreak...rabyte-sandisk

[SSJ4 Gogitta]

Neat how far we've come in nine and a half years.

[musicf8]

Nice, I have been wanting to switch to a new medium for archive purposes. I've gone from Floppy > CD > DVD+R > DVD+R DL > Blu-ray and lately since blu-rays are so rare for data i've been just using an external with archives as an ISO. I don't like using a mechanical hard drive though because... well.. moving parts... maybe I should switch to flash media.

[swingdjted]

I would like the small media to become available on the consumer market, because 1TB SD cards would be easy to store in small safety deposit boxes at banks or wherever else you feel is secure. All you really need is a weatherproof container of some sort and you could store lots of data in a small area just about anywhere. That would be helpful.

[gaekwad2]

As long as you remember that flash memory isn't suitable for archival, only for short to medium term backups. If you keep it in there for several years it may be unreadable by the time you need it.

[swingdjted]

So I should stick with standard hard drives? I think there are 10TB HDDs on the market already, not that I would need quite that much; perhaps maybe 5-6. I have been recording in 4K with the camera, and those vids add up. The funny thing is, I don't even have a TV that is 4K, just 1080p (recently bought a 75" Samsung). I figure some day a few decades down the road I might like the higher resolution though, and storage is cheap.

[gaekwad2]

For sticking into a bank vault and potentially leaving them there for years? No, hard drives also have to be used from time to time at least (though the data itself probably won't go bad so you could send it off to be recovered).

M-Discs are supposedly durable enough, but they're 100GB max per disc.

Or if you want to be absolutely sure, and have enough space and money...

[liza]

Originally Posted by swingdjted

I found this interesting... a full terabyte on one SD card:

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreak...rabyte-sandisk

This is quite useful. Thanks for sharing

[Too-DAMN-Much]

1GB then, the largest hard drive anyone could conceive of.

1GB now, a sixteenth of your computer's memory capacity.

Originally Posted by swingdjted

So I should stick with standard hard drives? I think there are 10TB HDDs on the market already, not that I would need quite that much; perhaps maybe 5-6. I have been recording in 4K with the camera, and those vids add up. The funny thing is, I don't even have a TV that is 4K, just 1080p (recently bought a 75" Samsung). I figure some day a few decades down the road I might like the higher resolution though, and storage is cheap.

what i do and would recommend for most people is get an m.2 SSD to install your OS and ONLY your operating system and then get a normal slow SSD for other things and if you're a gamer put most of your steam games and others onto a regular mechanical.

the m.2 SSDs are just amazingly fast, thrice as quick as my SATA ones, but don't use it for storage because SSDs are manufactured with an expiration date, i just recently had a SATA one die because i was using it as my hard drive for steam games and the updating finally killed it.

[swingdjted]

I would like secure off-site storage of large amounts of data, but I'm not sure what would be best without having to be bled all the time financially. Cloud storage seems pretty costly at this point when considering the amount of data needed to be stored. I guess I just need to do more research, or just buy portables and update them from time to time.

[gaekwad2]

Originally Posted by Too-DAMN-Much

what i do and would recommend for most people is get an m.2 SSD to install your OS and ONLY your operating system and then get a normal slow SSD for other things and if you're a gamer put most of your steam games and others onto a regular mechanical.

the m.2 SSDs are just amazingly fast, thrice as quick as my SATA ones

NVME ones are, there's also SATA via m.2 which isn't any faster than a regular 2.5" drive.
But unless you have to move large amounts of data between two NVME drives, those advantages are mostly theoretical anyway. What matters irl, especially for a system drive, is random performance and in that case even a 960 pro isn't much faster than an 850 evo.

Originally Posted by Too-DAMN-Much

but don't use it for storage because SSDs are manufactured with an expiration date, i just recently had a SATA one die because i was using it as my hard drive for steam games and the updating finally killed it.

They've got limited writes, but whether that's really what killed it rather than the controller going belly up...
Chrome and Firefox (the latter's behaviour can at least be changed though) will write huge amounts of data to disc if left open for extended periods of time, even if you do nothing with them.

Originally Posted by swingdjted

I would like secure off-site storage of large amounts of data, but I'm not sure what would be best without having to be bled all the time financially. Cloud storage seems pretty costly at this point when considering the amount of data needed to be stored. I guess I just need to do more research, or just buy portables and update them from time to time.

For large amounts usb drives are still the most economical solution. Maybe store another one at a friend's or relative's place to be safe against your house burning down and plug them in every now and then.

[musicf8]

Originally Posted by gaekwad2

For large amounts usb drives are still the most economical solution. Maybe store another one at a friend's or relative's place to be safe against your house burning down and plug them in every now and then.

Or crashplan would be easier for backing up data. Its good for backup really only though

[SerenityBlue]

I remember my first SD was only 20GB or 30 GB. I was shocked when the 128GB came out. Now, my external hard drive is 2TB. I can't imagine my files fitting in a 20GB SD.

[gaekwad2]

kids these days...

[Wolfgang]

I teach kids who were born around 2000. A few months ago I showed them a floppy disk and I explained how I used to download games online at school, split them up into as many parts as needed, put them on floppy disks and then piece them together at home.

They were amazed at all of those things: that I didn't have the internet at home, the meagre capacity of floppy disks and that a game could be about 3MB. The best thing, though, was that some of them only then realised why the "save" icon is what it is.

[gaekwad2]

Windows really needs to get with the times.

[Too-DAMN-Much]

Originally Posted by gaekwad2

-snip-

it stops being theoretical only when i've benchmarked the read/write/etc speeds of both current standard SATA to m.2 and saw m.2 post triple the scores, to be honest.

[gaekwad2]

If your practical use consists of running benchmarks.

[swingdjted]

Originally Posted by Wolfgang

I teach kids who were born around 2000. A few months ago I showed them a floppy disk and I explained how I used to download games online at school, split them up into as many parts as needed, put them on floppy disks and then piece them together at home.

They were amazed at all of those things: that I didn't have the internet at home, the meagre capacity of floppy disks and that a game could be about 3MB. The best thing, though, was that some of them only then realised why the "save" icon is what it is.

My job is also teaching students that are on average 14-18 years old. It is very difficult to describe in a way that shows understanding or meaning the enormous difference in computer specifications that have changed in my 39-year lifetime.

Our curriculum for the Industrial Revolution makes an attempt at this sort of speedy technology change, but we have almost no formalized curriculum for showing today's students what has happened as far as processing and storage of digital data in recent years.

Most of these students do not feel the need to learn this stuff due to mobile devices and cloud storage, because they simply feel they should just pay a monthly fee and all their stuff (as far as processing and storage) gets handled for them by someone else.

For a short while there, it didn't take a lot of unusual effort to learn or understand these concepts and one's own ability to have ownership of hardware that could take care of their data and processing needs. Now it's back to pushing for a payment so that some other paid person could handle it. I don't like that.

[gaekwad2]

Originally Posted by swingdjted

Most of these students do not feel the need to learn this stuff due to mobile devices and cloud storage, because they simply feel they should just pay a monthly fee and all their stuff (as far as processing and storage) gets handled for them by someone else.

You could tell them about the consequences of giving effectively everybody access to your private data.

And as for ownership of your hardware, you could make them read and discuss some FSF texts (as long as it hasn't yet been labeled a terrorist organisation).