Hard drives and history

When I started at the railway in 1995, the fellow from the Operations area that took me on the tour of the data centre was proudly boasting of the new disk subsystem they had just installed for the mainframe.  “This new subsystem gives us almost half a terabyte of DASD,” he beamed, to the delight and awe of his guide-ees.  I don’t recall how much it had cost, but for some reason $1/MB seems not too far off the mark.  It was a huge full-height frame, running on three-phase power and coming close to the floor loading limits for the room…

Tonight, I went into a store — not even a computer products store, mind, just a general office goods store — and purchased one terabyte of disk in a package that runs off an AC adaptor and I can fit on the palm of my hand.  And, the cost was considerably less than $1/GB.  The unit was on the shelf, with another of the same type — no special order or promotion, just normal store stock.

The madness doesn’t end there: for $50 more I could have gone across the road to a different store and got the network-attached version.  That store had four of those units on the shelf.

The unit I bought is the WD MyBook Premium Edition II.  I looked for a while at the network version, (MyBook World II) but although the embedded OS is Linux-based and a throwaway line in a Wikipedia entry mentions an Open firmware can be placed on it, I could find no evidence that this is the case.  The unit only provides Windows shares, and that’s not so useful to me.

I configured my device in RAID-1 mode, so the 1TB (I should say 1 trillion bytes, as usable base-2 capacity was about 932GB) becomes about 465GB.  I’m attaching it to the Power Mac using Firewire-800, which should make for a nice storage area for video editing and the like.