What you can learn from old hard drive adverts | Hacker News Reader

What you can learn from old hard drive adverts

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70 pointszdw16 comments

Really cool! I was lucky as a kid to have found a next-door computer store where I had basically unlimited access to old computer parts like these. It was the 90s so it was old MFM drives, XT boards, and so on, but I could get minix running on them and it was amazing. Growing up really poor, it was the only way I could get access to interesting hardware, but you could learn a lot playing with that old stuff. Of course, x86 architecture stuck around for a long time and I can still build a modern PC more or less using the evolved versions of this skills.

There was a truly terrible Keanu Reaves movie released in the mid 90's, Johnny Mnemonic (which I just learned was based on a William Gibson book of the same name).

I haven't watched the movie in 25 years, but from memory the premise is that corporations use human brains as organic/wetware hard drives to transfer information because hardware-only storage has largely maxed out or would be too cumbersome for information smuggling.

In the movie, the base storage capacity of the human brain is said to be 80gb, though the protagonist is able to increase his storage capacity to 320gb by using a cybernetic implant and agreeing to dump a bunch of his childhood memories to make extra room.

This seemed like a ludicrous amount of data to 10 year old me. Our recently purchased top of the line 486 had a 400MB hard drive, so the amount of data stored in Keanu's head was nearly 3 orders of magnitude more.

Exponential growth is a hell of thing.

How ironic is it that a movie expressly about memory storage could be so forgettable!

Where's your song about that, Alanis Morrissette?

Gibson said later that 80 GB would obviously have been too small to be really impressive, but no one called it out. https://mobile.twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/13396882971660...

Part of the problem is likely nobody would understand what “terabyte” was an petabyte would have just sounded wrong

Showing the change in characteristics:

   One way to look at this is how long it would take to read the whole drive with a serial stream of 4kB random reads. The 1980s drive would take about 3 minutes. The SSD would take around 8 hours. The modern hard drive would take about 10 months. It's not a surprise to anybody that small random IOs are slow, but maybe not how slow. It's a problem that's getting exponentially worse.

I was just explaining to a coworker that their RAID5 rebuild is likely going to over a day, during which time they shouldn't even think about any I/O intensive activities like snapshot merging in VMware.

The first time I did a RAID rebuild after a failed drive replacement was back around 2002 and it took just a couple of hours, if that.

This (and write performance) is one of the reasons why mkfs now defers initializing block groups until the drive is mounted. After mount the kernel initializes them slowly in the background. I did a talk which covers this:

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/02/04/video-take-your-loop-m... (right at the end of the talk)

Just the graphics: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/11/04/nbd-graphical-viewer/

I remember having an Elec-Tec catalog with the back cover listing a 10MB hard drive for $10K. I kept it for awhile, thinking of it as will be iconic someday. Sure enough, that is the era / order-of-magnitude recalled in the OP.

Why, only a dollar a kilobyte!

For the sake of comparing apples to apples, the 10MB disk in 1980 that cost $3400 would now cost almost $11,000, whereas the price of a modern 18TB HDD is $400.

You could buy 27 18TB disks for the price of that 10MB disk in 1980. I didn't do the math, but at first glance, it sounds impressive. But even if your mirrored all 27 disks, you'd still not approach a reasonable gain of IOPS/GiB. It really is fascinating to compare!

Hard drive progression is definitely interesting.

I don't have any numbers, but I have an old SPARC laptop from 1995, with dual slim SCSI drives from IBM. Thin little drives from the early 90s, going from 300-900 MB. And man, those things have aged phenomenally well. The controller could read both at 10MB/s each simultaneously, with seek speeds of only around 14 ms, not that far from the 5 mentioned in the article.

I really don't think the HDDs in my modern laptops are more than at most a single order of magnitude superior in anything except storage density.

I would agree with that. Today I replaced an 11 year old Western Digital Green 500GB HDD with a new Seagate 2TB HDD. The WD Green still runs fine! But, it's 11 years old. That's a long time in HDD years. Its brother is a 10 year old Seagate 500GB HDD which, as soon as it's done copying to the 2TB disk, is also being retired. But you never know, I might pull them out of retirement at any point for a non critical project. They're both in excellent shape. And unless you change to SSD, the technology hasn't change so much in the last decade that these things are garbage.

On the other hand you can buy 1TB of RAM for that $11k also, I don't know how many "IOPS" that would get you but I bet its a lot.

Drive prices followed a trend so well in the 1980s and 90s that I wrote a javascript based web page to predict prices and it worked up to about 1996 or so.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970722114034/http://www.tsrcom...

https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm chronological list, there is also https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update

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