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) ;D. Barely made a blip on the available space.
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.
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.
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.