Thinking on storage
I just bought a 128GB Samsung SD Card for 39.99PLN (~9EUR), and that made me think about the progress that storage made since I started using computers.
I have this opinion that in the realm of IT, storage is where the progress is most palpable, most visible.
Of course with CPUs there has been also a massive progress, the first CPU I used, a 386, had clock speeds from 12.5Mhz to 40Mhz, depending on the version (thanks Wikipedia). The CPU in the laptop on which I am writing those words can boost up to 4Ghz, increase with a factor of 100. But visualizing that development is much harder, especially as its clouded in other factors, like improvements in IPC and going from single to multiple cores. Number go up good, but can you feel it?
For storage it’s something different, especially if you are over 30 as I am, and remember how it used to be. And storage is about things you can see, or listen to, move from place to place.
This post has no particular reason or moral, I just want to talk how I remember and feel about storing stuff on my PC.
The first PC ever that I was using, that my dad brought home somewhere in the mid 90s, probably 1996? had no hard drive, as it was too expensive. I remember that to start the computer, you had to insert a yellow floppy from which it would boot to DOS, and then to play my fav game of that time, Mahjongg, you had to insert another diskette. For them youngsters, a single 3.5” floppy disk held 1.44MB of data. Megabytes.
Fast forward a few years, and a few iterations of the Family Computer in the Computer Room, my dad gave me a separate partition to store my games. It was 700MB. When I bought Diablo II I had to choose the “minimum install”, as the full one would not fit.
In the middle of high school, ~2006, my dad bought himself a laptop and gave me our family computer, at that time it had a total 60GB of storage in two hard drives.
From a 1.44MB floppy to 60GB HDDs in ten years.
I took that PC with me to study at the University, and I filled it to the brim with MP3s (arrrr!) and RAW files from my DSLR. A MP3 was 5MB, and a single RAW file was 10MB.
Speaking of RAW files, it was at that time when I bought my first DSLR from money I earned from working in a hardware shop. I think I paid somewhere around 200PLN(~50EUR) for a 2GB SD Card.
And since then it went quickly, in 2009 I got a laptop with a 250GB 2.5” hard drive. In 2015 I bought and build from scratch my first very own desktop PC, with a 1TB HDD and a 250GB SSD. My next PC had a 4TB HDD and 1TB NVME SSD.
Finally, today my knees are being warmed by my NAS sitting under my desk. The NAS has in total six drives, 5 HDDs and a single boot SSD. In total, there’s 13.5TB of raw space inside that box, with 8.5TB of it being usable, as some drives are mirrored.
In 28 years, from a floppy disk to a ZFS mirror. From 1.4MB to 13.5TB, 13500000MB, a factor of almost one million.
And again, this is something you can actually see. It’s hard to spot or visualize in your head the difference between 3GHz and 4GHz CPUs, or 2600MT/s vs 3600MT/s RAM speeds, but for drives, it’s there. If you still have MP3s, you can actually store thousands of times more of them on your drives, and that happened in less than a decade.
When I was having that laptop, I was taking a lot of photos, and eventually I run out of space on the 250GB HDD. So I started backuping them on DVD drives. At that time, 4.7GB felt like quite a lot for storing data. A few months ago, when I finally went through of all my DVDs and put them on my NAS, 4.7GB was just a blip, barely recognizable on a graph in Grafana.
I think this has been so far the most random, old-man-waves-at-clouds post in my blog. But hey, sometimes I feel like writing a detailed tutorial, and sometimes I just write all that random stuff that comes to my mind. Hope you like both of those.
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