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Computer drive sizes over the years (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!

Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.

So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 46 minutes ago* (last edited 44 minutes ago)

Kind of hard to see the scale, but the drive that this removable platter would go into, took the full width of a 19" rack.

It once held several megabytes, but now it's a decoration in my office.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

I've got a full-height 5 1/4" 1GB hard drive around here. Thing is massive.

I've also got most of the storage devices I've ever used over the decades:

5 1/4" floppy
3 1/2" floppy
4mm DAT tape
8mm DAT tape
1/4" QIC tape
Zip disk
Cassette tape
Punched tape

I'm missing the following:

DLT tape
8" floppy
IBM 2315 disk pack

Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Magneto-optical. Even better.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn't have auto parking.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Syquest cartridges.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

I've actually got a little stack of punch cards. It's a program my dad wrote when he was in college, he gave it to me when I started programming

[-] [email protected] -4 points 7 hours ago

Women had it good back then.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

I don't understand what you mean could you elaborate?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

Size matters.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

T'was big

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

The drives were big?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

It’s a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago

[-] [email protected] 8 points 20 hours ago

The left most one is also an HDD? It looks like what I imagine a tape drive would look like but searching for them shows very different results lol

[-] [email protected] 9 points 17 hours ago

Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago

For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).

[-] [email protected] 85 points 1 day ago

5MB of storage in 1956.

5MB storage in 1956

[-] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller...

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[-] [email protected] 93 points 1 day ago

And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra

[-] [email protected] 11 points 22 hours ago

To their credit as of 4 years ago all their devices come with high-speed SSDs, the issue is they charge 5x market price for storage and RAM size upgrades.

[-] [email protected] 64 points 1 day ago

Their customers buy it, so they arent changing that

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

lack of education is Apple's bread and butter.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago

That’s Windows users, Apple at least has to make it difficult for users to install something else

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

Apple livea on the notion of 'a fool and his money are soon parted' and can you blame them? They are one of, if not the, most profitable companies around. If it works why change it.

[-] [email protected] 42 points 1 day ago

Wait, 1tb?

You're leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.

[-] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago

Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we'll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

And they crap out so quickly. I can't even count the number of SD cards I've had to throw in the trash. I don't think I've ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

This is why for retro computers, I tend to prefer CompactFlash. IDE->CF adapters are cheap, and the cards are much higher quality. They effectively become an SSD that works on old stuff. (Just because I like retro computing stuff doesn't mean I want the whole experience, like waiting for disk heads to move, or worse, tape drives to finish reading. I'm old enough that I remember dealing with it and I don't need to deal with it again.)

Not a lot of call for them otherwise, though. SD cards have gotten increasingly good bandwidth, which means they're good enough for a lot of higher end cameras. CF is getting squeezed out.

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[-] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago

Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

There were even smaller hard drives. The iPod used a 1.8in drive.

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[-] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

Same first hard drive I bought! Crazy we both remembered the model number too. Got mine in 1990 so not $800 I don't believe, but regardless it was all I could afford after buying the 8087 math coprocessor too!

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Forgot about copro. Everyone and their dog had to have it back then.

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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025

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