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Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

My first HDD was 40 meg (in a ~$6000 inflation adjusted computer). For the same price it's eminently feasible to get a system (computer + a NAS or three) with 40 TB. If my calculations aren't wrong that's enough for over ~77.6 years (24/7) worth of compressed audio @ 128 kB/s.

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Of course if you have 40TB you might also want to have uncompressed audio & also have video.

Every single hard drive I got so far, no matter how big it seemed at the time, I managed to fill with data. Generated data is like a gas, it will just expand to fill in the available space.

For most people that space is taken up by caching other peoples work, AKA movies, programs, music etc. After I could stream HD content over my internet connection I feel little need to keep a local copy of most of these so I have actually started to use less HDD over the two years.

It's still feels odd, I filled up a 750GB HDD then I got a 240 GB SSD and a 2TB HDD and yet I find I am useing less HDD now than before the upgrade.

Mine was 6Mb. I had to build my own interface card and I/O driver for it (for my Heathkit H11).

And it was still enormously useful over those floppies.

How much is that (the price of the 40meg HDD) as a percentage of your income now? Is it the same as a similar specialist back then?

This was a home computer, but it was still a significant purchase for dual income professionals. 1989 release price in the USA with the same upgrades we had US$2899 (without monitor?), then the screen (14"), software, printer and "outside the USA price hike" must have made up the other ~$1101. I get far bigger usb sticks for free at conferences these days. Raspberry Pi + a screen or a bottom of the line netbook for $200 is hundreds of times more powerful. 133 times more powerful if we just talk 1989-mhz (12mhz) to 2011-mhz (atom 1.6gighz), which is inaccurate. So things have gotten about 30 times cheaper and insanely more powerful.

Edit: to address your question more directly it was like a "second hand car" purchase maybe ~10% median annual household income vs ~0.3% these days for the netbook. This is all back of the envelope stuff though.

Back in 1991 we took out a special insurance policy to cover the computers and hardware in our house (two professional coders). Just the hardware came to $22,000. (We figured the software was just licenses which couldn't effectively be stolen.)

My first HDD was on a Commodore Amiga and was a mighty 60Mb.

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