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

5MB of storage in 1956.

Wait, 1tb?

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

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.

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.

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
• LTO tape
• 8" floppy
• IBM 2315 disk pack

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

EDIT Don't know how I forgot about cartridges (Atari 400 and 2600 - still got em!) and CDROM/DVD/WORM. I have CDROM, DVDROM (in various formats), but no WORM media (i.e. IBM 3363 - a CDROM in a rigid case, before the official CD standard was created).

Meanwhile I'm traveling soon and "packing" microSDs, like... 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It's ridiculous!

I considered buying the 2To ones ... but I don't even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it's to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don't even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.

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

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

In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100's of kg range.

Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven't been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.

Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they're getting this small.

I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they're all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.

I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.

I remember all the formats shown.

My first machine was an AST Research 286 16Mhz (in "turbo" mode) with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, and a 40 MB 5-1/4" hard drive. I paid ~$2000 for it in the late 80s. That was a good move, I knew more about computers than most people applying for jobs at the time, and that allowed me to make a decent living without a college degree.

And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.