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? :-)

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 :)

[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

[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.