1.5 Terabyte

[peternap]

My old external hard drive was starting to behave badly, so I bought another tonight. Lord have they come a long way.

I got a 1.5 Terabyte drive and moved 45000 pictures over (Lots of game camera pics) . Barely made a blip on the available space.

[MountainDon]

Computers or hard drives behaving badly; not good.

We certainly have come a long long way. We bought an IBM PC back in late 1981. It had an externally mounted FIVE (5) MB monster of a hard drive. I believe the drive alone cost something like $450 - 500 back then. The computer was just under $1600 with the amber monochrome display.    I also bumped the drive and knocked several hundred KB worth of track space off to who knows where... Got a bigger better drive soon after; TEN MB.

[John_C]

The 1960 winter Olympics were held at Squaw Valley, CA.  It was the first Olympiad at which the results were compiled by computer.  At the top of Squaw Valley is a small building, I'd guess 700 sq. ft.  There is a bronze plaque explaining that the building housed the computer. The 5 mb hard drive basically filled the building and cooling the computer was made easier by the abundance of cold, dry air at that altitude.

I forget the exact numbers, but when we were there I explained to my daughter that it would take a village of more than 2000 of those buildings to equal the storage capacity of my then new, but now obsolete, iMac.

[MountainDon]

Yeah, I recall seeing a photo someplace of one of those early hard drives; the platter diamter was measured in double digit feet!  I like to hear what one of those sounded like when they crashed? I believe that's how the term hard drive crash came about... sounded horrendous.