Hitachi has announced their terabyte drive.

One terabyte? In one hard drive?

Ye gods.

Well, it's not like you couldn't see it coming. We've had multi-hundred gig drives for a while now. It's not that much bigger. For instance, it's equivalent to only two five hundreds.

You don't understand, Rand. I was using PCs when the biggest drive you could get for one was a 5.25" DSDD that held 360K. I can remember using 3.5" 1.44MB disks to carry around my files, and having half that disk free. I can remember when a 10MB hard drive was something only serious users needed, and even those serious users said 40 megabytes was more than they'd ever need. I can remember when disk manufacturers and tech-press pundits all agreed that a 500MB drive was approaching the physical limits of magnetic-disk technology, and we'd all have to switch to magneto-optical or some other drive technology to achieve higher data capacities.

And yet, today they're using that same old magnetic-disk technology to make one-terabyte drives. All within my adult lifetime.

Every time we start using another prefix for disk sizes, it's a fresh demonstration that there are no limits to the technology. Technology that has no limits scares me. Just a little bit, but it does.

As far as I know, the Hitachi unit is a very cleverly packaged multi-platter deal. There's no improvement in aerial density there. Nobody ships a thermal-magnetic drive at this time... OK, knowing how often I was wrong in comments at Rand's blog I kind of hope that this time I'll spur drive vendors to innovate just to upstage me. :-)

Using the 5.25 floppies as examples of 'old' is just scary. Please don't prompt people to come out of the woodwork to discuss the 8" & 12" floppies, or the paper cards and paper tapes.

Floppies, you say? Luxury!!!

Why, when I was a wee lad, I had to write my assembly code on a piece of paper, compile it to binary by hand, and then toggle it into memory one byte at a time via front panel rocker switches of my trusty PDP-8!

Uphill, both ways ...

Over broken glass, w/o shoes .....

And when I got home, my father ......

:-)

PS. How does one properly express a Welsh accent in ASCII ?