Geek alert: 750 GB hard drives

[bjarvis]

Yesterday, Seagate announced their new 750 GB hard drive:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060426/ap_on_hi_te/seagate_monster_drives_1

Gawd. Imagine how many tonnes of punched cards these things could have replaced if we still used them.

Comments

[abqdan.livejournal.com]

Damn! I just ordered a new server for our home network, and a pair of 300GB drives. Now I'll have to add a pair of 750GB drives... will this madness never end? :-)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

We applaud you for your ongoing support of the economy. :-)

I still use punch cards

[otterpop58.livejournal.com]

as bookmarks...

I kept some from my high school and college daze.

Now, imagine keeping your digital music collection on punch cards :)

Re: I still use punch cards

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch stored away somewhere, just for laughs. Numbered, of course. :-) I haven't used them (or 8" and 5.25" floppies) in a great many years, and I'm happy to keep it that way.

[jss]

And 3.5" floppies?

(I've got some punch cards-as-bookmarks around somewhere, and the last of the floppies never made the MA-to-MN move.)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I still have a number of 3.5" floppies around home but they're not in active usage anymore --like my Zip disks-- since my USB flash memory has displaced them.

Re: I still use punch cards

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Now, imagine keeping your digital music collection on punch cards :)

Or how many to store a downloadable episode of, say, "Battlestar Galactica"? Oy.

Re: I still use punch cards

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

BSGA! *melt*

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I don't remember enough about Hollerith card specs to do better than estimate, but here goes a guesstimate:

750 x 10^9 bytes: new drive
card: roughly 80 bytes +- factor of 2
weight of card: guess .1 oz
tonne / oz = 2.83495231 × 10-5 (from Google Conversions)

7.5x10^11 bytes/disk * 1x10^-2 cards/byte * 1x10^-1 oz/card * 2.8^10-5 tonne/oz --> 2x10^4 tonnes (of cards) per disk

Very roughly 20,000 tonnes of cards. Eek. Of course I may have made a mistake and I don't care enough to check... :)




c. 2x10^4

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

You have far too much time on your hands. :-)

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Not really. Just shirking my duties. And where do *you* get the time for your mental health breaks? :)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I gave up sleeping & eating. It was overrated anyway. :-)

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

with who are you not sleeping and who are you not eating?

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

Math is hard!

[jkusters]

And I was just shopping for a new hard drive last night... :-)

(I spent the good part of a Summer one year taking cases and cases of punched cards and reading them into a computer so that the programs they contained could be stored on magnetic tape. Punch cards are fun! Card readers are even funner! ;-)

JOhn.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Don't know when the 750 GB drives will be available, but the 400 GB ones currently are. My pr0n collection isn't anything like that big (yet).

[jkusters]

*LOL*

I actually do not know why we're running out of space on the computer in question. It's shared by everyone in the household (though I only use it to play Sims 2 and Age of Empires), so I suspect that somebody in my house is storing lots of, um, stuff. We were down to 1GB left on a 120GB drive the other night.

It seems almost absurd that even through storage capacity grows by leaps and bounds, we're always almost out of room...

JOhn.