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.
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
Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.
For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).
5MB of storage in 1956.
Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller…
That would hold 1.66 copies of war and peace.
They could’ve just compressed it using 7zip. Text files compress really small!
/j
A space ship descends and lands outside my door, and and a benevolent Alien pops out and hands me a 512 MB USB stick.
“I crafted this for your species, and made sure it’s compatible with your hardware standards. It contains the sum total knowledge of all life in the universe and can be used to accelerate your species to the next plane of existence.”
I thank him tearfully and he departs with a warm smile, ascending back up into the soon-to-be-knowable cosmos from when he came.
I plug the stick into my machine, and check out the directory. Inside are two files:
105 MB knowledge.tar.piidx 328 KB README.txtI open up the readme file to learn more about the PIIDX file format so that I can uncompress the sum total knowledge of all existence. General gist:
- Uses a compression algorithm with an infinite dictionary based on prime numbers
- Uses a storage/retrieval algorithm based on the digits of Pi
Realise quickly that the file will never be opened in my lifetime
Once you have one copy on there it would be awfully wasteful to fill the rest up with a 0.66 copy though.
And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra
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.
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.
lack of education is Apple’s bread and butter.
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.
Wait, 1tb?
You’re leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.
Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we’ll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.
And they crap out so quickly. I can’t even count the number of SD cards I’ve had to throw in the trash. I don’t think I’ve ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.
This is why for retro computers, I tend to prefer CompactFlash. IDE->CF adapters are cheap, and the cards are much higher quality. They effectively become an SSD that works on old stuff. (Just because I like retro computing stuff doesn’t mean I want the whole experience, like waiting for disk heads to move, or worse, tape drives to finish reading. I’m old enough that I remember dealing with it and I don’t need to deal with it again.)
Not a lot of call for them otherwise, though. SD cards have gotten increasingly good bandwidth, which means they’re good enough for a lot of higher end cameras. CF is getting squeezed out.
Invest in Samsung Pro Endurane SD cards, they last a lot longer. I believe Sandisk has a similar product but I have never used it.
There are way too many counterfeit cards mixed in with the legitimate stock out there for me to bother spending too much on any single card. I typically go for the midrange offerings and roll the dice.
I don’t know What everyone does to get counterfeit cards all the time. I never had one. Are they just less prevalent in Europe than in America? Maybe it’s because I don’t buy them online?
Probably the latter, I doubt any sizable brick and mortar store is likely to be sent a batch of counterfeits from their distributor.
I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we’ll get those for cheap.
In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we’re comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I’m gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren’t even near the bottom of the specs table.
Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that’s because people like simple things more than true things.
Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.
There were even smaller hard drives. The iPod used a 1.8in drive.
But we’re on Lemmy so everything Apple does is bad!
What are you talking about this wasn’t even Apple’s invention, it was used in quite a few devices, it’s probably more that people aren’t aware of it
I’m just remaking on the general “Apple is the worst” sentiment I see here. What popular non-Apple device used this hard drive?
Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.
Same first hard drive I bought! Crazy we both remembered the model number too. Got mine in 1990 so not $800 I don’t believe, but regardless it was all I could afford after buying the 8087 math coprocessor too!
I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.
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.
Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they’re getting this small.
I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they’re all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.
2280 seems to be the most common DIY size, 2230 is common for business machines, sometimes in an adapter to fit a normal 2.5" HDD bay or a slot large enough for 2280. I just removed one from the 2280 adapter last week to get data off after the storm came through the east coast.
The fact that those measurements are in inches when “2280” means 22mm x 80mm agitates me.
When the measurement is already in the designation, the only point to adding information is for “translation.” It would irk me if someone felt the need to point out a 2280 was 80 mm long while a 2230 was only 30 mm long. I mean it’s already in the name…
I mean I appreciate the mention or else I wouldn’t have learned it
Welcome to merica!
Welcome to everywhere. 3.5" disks in German are called “dreieinhalb Zoll Disketten”, and in Dutch “drie punt vijf inch floppys”. Both of those translate roughly to “three and a half inch disks/floppies”. Everyone borrowed US computer terms and translated them directly.
No country uses the metric system exclusively. None. You will find exceptions if you look for them. This isn’t some kind of moral failing, it’s just practicality. Look at how car tires are sold for one example that’s nearly universal due to industry standards.
It was a joke
There’s terabyte SD cards now, that are almost that fast.
They are more limited in storage space than the 2280s but yeah the thing is tiny, almost 1/3 length even at 30mm. It’s literally the size of a postage stamp I’m stunned
In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100’s of kg range.
Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven’t been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.
“Sitting on top” is a brilliant way to display that.
Very effective.
The RAM section with the hand woven memory modules is so awesome. 1kb of RAM; tiny iron rings with fine copper wires threaded through them.
My mother worked in a factory making those things when she was young.
Oh and the wires were gold and hair thin, and they did the whole thing by hand.
This was at some point in the 60s.
Oldest hard drives I’ve dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.
what’s the one on the right?
WD_Black SN770M. There are 1/2, 1, and 2tb models I have the 1tb version here. https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-1tb-sn770m/p/N82E16820250263
It’s an M.2 NVMe or sata drive.
It’d be gnar if the smallest one was also a magnetic platter hard drive.
The smallest old style hard drive I can think of is the iPod. But now I want to know if any magnetic platter drives got smaller than that… 🤔
Afaik, it’s all been solid state after that. Even newer iPods.
I said the real microdrive.
It’s so tiny! 😍
Omg it was made in 1998?! :O
Pulled from my Life drive :)
And further into the article: “Toshiba decided to skip the 1” form factor, and in March 2004 announced a 0.85" drive that shipped in September of the same year.[38] "
ADORABLE AAAAA
gnar
You made me think of GWAR
Gwar is pretty gnar.
Oh wow. I didn’t even know that was a platter drive! I’m kinda glad I kept that thing.
As far as I’m aware 1.8" is the smallest form factor for mechanical hard drives.
Nope, they did make 0.85" ones. Here’s someone taking one apart: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QB0KdAj54xg
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.
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.
