Does anyone REALLY need 1TB?
I don't usually blog about hardware, but a milestone passed fairly quietly last week: A couple of major hardware producers (including Seagate and Toshiba) announced that they would soon be releasing 1TB hard drives (that's 1,000,000,000,000 bytes) to the general public. This reminded of the good old days when, whenever a computer was announced with more RAM or a larger HD, we'd all knowingly laugh and declare that no would ever need that much storage space. No matter how many times we were wrong, we held fast to our belief that, this time, they had finally gone too far.The first PC I remember with a built-in hard drive was my dad's KayPro in the mid-80's; it had a whopping 10MB of disk space, and we were sure we had attained some sort of storage Nirvana. These days, a 10MB Flash drive in your USB Elmo doll would probably get you laughed out of preschool.
Nowadays, we seem to take it for granted that hard disks will get bigger and processors will get faster. I suppose that's a good thing. As an end-user, it's nice to no longer have to wait for the next generation of hardware, frustrated that I could only work in sixteen colors or run one program at a time. Still, limitations made us strong, and having to type on chiclet keys and wait twenty minutes for a program to load is what separated the men from the boys. Some part of me misses those days.
Brian
· Thursday, January 18Agreed. One of my first computers was a Commodore 64, and I was pretty excited about moving up from a tape drive to a 5 1/4 floppy drive. One of my friends got the Commodore 10MB HD when it first came out, and I remember thinking, "who in the world needs 10MB of storage unless they were going to run a BBS?"
Today I'm thinking two 1TB drives setup with RAID1 would be nice to have with all my mp3s and digital photos.
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, January 18I remember the tape drive on my TRS-80. I think it took something like five minutes for one of my favorite games to load, and there's nothing like the sound of data transfer for grating your nerves. Finally, my dad and I took two Seagate drives out of his machine and rigged them to run on mine. Just the connectors, power supply and case for the two floppies cost almost $300! These days, if you can find a 3-1/2" external floppy, it's about $10. You'd have to go to a museum for a 5-1/4", so that's probably back up to $300 :)