10 TB Solid State Drives Coming...

I do remember those days. But I also remember being a dork because I had a computer. The tech-savvy were still only a few short steps away from the slide ruler days.

I mean, I could have been a dork regardless of the computer, but it came with the package.

 

You were a dork, but I was a boring English major who did 400 million pages of typing with horrid correction tape in the 80s, so in my circle we reacted to PCs with IBM DisplayWrite like this:

 

10TB in the palms of our hands but we still can't handle spellcheck.

 

Give us a chance... we've now sorted the sound system. Admittedly we're pulling the hardware contract from McLaren.

 

I remember paying £70 to upgrade my computer from 1k to 4k of memory.

 

There was also a point in the 90s where I reacted to an ad for a new PC with, "OK, this is ridiculous. What ordinary person is ever going to fill up a GIGABYTE of disk space?"

 

If you understand anything about silicon chips, this is a major fracking step.
The article said available in about a year.
To me that means 10TB drives or there abouts won't be affordable to the average user for another year+.
I bought a laptop with SSDs configured in RAID 0 18 months ago.
I can now get twice the capacity SSDs for just slightly more money today.
I wonder about heat dispersion in chips this dense.

 

Yes we throw everything away except digital images.

 

LOL. Me too. We've come a long way...

 

I hear ya, man. I remember installing a FULL-HEIGHT, 5-1/4-inch, 10 megabyte hard drive in my IBM PC clone.
When I initiated the low-level format of the drive, I could swear the desk was rocking.

 

I can remember in the early nineties spending thousands to put 64 meg of RAM in a sampler.

 

Hard drives? When I started, we had to store our data on PUNCH CARDS!

 

Oh yeah, when I was in college from 1979-82, at the end of spring semester when all the computer science majors had finished their final projects, the entire campus would be littered with punch cards. I'd go to the computer lab with my comp. sci. major buddy and he'd debug something and send his corrected box of cards through the queue, and then we'd go out and have a cigarette and a beer or coke or something while we waited for the paper printout of his program to be delivered to his lab mailbox by the staff.

And when I was in junior high, you could take an elective summer school class in keypunch operation.

 

Seriously though, my digital library seems to have peaked out at around 6TB, but I would be so happy to get rid of spinning drives and RAID and pick up three of these. One to use and two to rotate through as backups.

The only issue I see is that it takes a lot of time to move that much data. I restored 2TB a few months ago and it took over a day.

 

Remember that well. I was doing engineering at the University of Queensland and we would take the punch cards down to the computer room in the basement and you would put your stack of cards in the tray and come back the next day to pick up the print out and the cards and hope you had not made a syntax error because you would be screwed and have to try and organize another run. This was 1969. FORTRAN. It taught you to think clearly and plan it all out. Now I just wing it and if it doesn't work, fix it in the mix.

 

I'm considering new HDD for my library and backups. From a technology stand point I'd love to have (3) 5TB units but given the cost (still) of relatively small SSD the potential initial costs are a little frightening. Still, very cool.

 

I'm not expecting the price for these SS drives to be affordable in the near term. The large multi-TB sizes may be technically possible soon, but they will be unobtanium for mere mortals.

I'm looking at getting a 12TB NAS (2x6TB). Maybe by the time that NAS shows its age and needs to be replaced the large capacity SSD storage options will be affordable. Maybe.

 

Good grief - I can remember the day our company took delivery of their first PC with 3.5" floppy drives. The female secretary only had supplies of 5.25 floppy discs in the store cupboard. She asked me in all seriousness if she trimmed off the 5.25" discs with scissors would they work in the 3.5 drive ??!!

 

Wow, shut up and take my money (also)!

 

Paper tape trumps punch cards.