Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I remember buying a 1GB SCSI drive for $950 pretty much because it was the size of all the disk storage in the machine room at USC when I was attending (three strings of drives 330MB each string, whohoo!). I was just amazed at one drive that I could buy with as much storage as that entire room. I have it sitting next to an original ST506 drive from Shugart (5MB in 5.25" full height form factor).

Interestingly, still 1 in 10^15 unrecoverable bit error rate[1]. What that means from a practical standpoint is that you are essentially guaranteed an unrecoverable bit read error if you read the drive end to end (as you would if you were re-silvering a RAID 1 mirror), and in a RAID6 configuration I'm guessing it will take about a week to reconstruct a failed drive at low priority. All that storage behind a single port which has a sequential transfer rate of 255 MBs[1].

[1] https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_ass...

What that means from a practical standpoint is that you are essentially guaranteed an unrecoverable bit read error if you read the drive end to end

That sounds scary, but if I remember a research paper from a few years ago (reading smaller drives multiple times over), these are very conservative estimates.

Also, I think you're an order of magnitude off --- 10^15 bits is close to 100TB, not 10TB.

I remember my first 1 gig drive, it was a full height 5 1/4" external scsi, with the giant 50 pin cable. You could hear the seeks from other rooms.

You guys are making me feel old. My father bought my first 20 MiB hard drive used for close to $1000. It was the size of a VCR and sounded like a jet engine.

I'll join in. My first HD was a 40 MB Seagate 5.25 for $900, attached to an Apple //gs.

I once had a Miniscribe 40MB drive that would actually cause the desk to visibly shake when you were reading & writing to it.

My first HDD was 5mb and it would shake the desk from inside the XT computer too :)

That was the first hard drive I ever saw, the very first time I was told about hard drives and learned what a hard drive was.

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