The Petabyte

[Santaman]

I still have a Seagate ST4096 5'25" full height MFM controller and a whopping 80(!!!) Megabyte..
Was a real modern drive, instead of a stepper motor it had a voice coil actuator,

Next up is a ST4026, 5'25" full height 20 Mb also with a voice coil actuator

Oh and a 10M Seagate ST412 also 5.25" full height MFM 10Mb of course this one was stepper motor driven.

They all work fine, the ST412 is from 1983 and works like sunshine.

Next to those I've got a whole boat load of Seagate ST225's they're indestructible.. 21M 5.25" half height so the size of a CD-ROM drive.

Besides the problem of cramming more and more data onto platters the other problem is being able to position the read/write heads accurate enough, the stepper motor had a table which told it to step an x amount to find a track, because of the platters expanding and contracting again due to warmth or cold they sometimes were unable to find a track and report an error.

Voice coil actuators are more stupid, they have no clue where they are at all so in those old drives you actually had an extra platter with the track info encoded into it so the actuator would know where it was.

As for drives getting cheaper, yes some.. my 4096 is now between 500 and 700 Euro's worth..

 

[23skidoo]

In light of my recently posted thread/rant about Internet useage fees in Canada, I'd love to see what would (and will) happen once people started tossing about Petabyte files. Already it's possible to download single-part multi-Gigabyte files (something that was said to be impossible at one point), I'm sure industry is already moving Terabyte files (or will be soon). A single Petabyte file would probably bring the Internet 1.0 infrastructure to its knees and drive entire ISPs out of business!

I remember when the first Tb externals were introduced. I remember the big caution being whether or not one's PC had enough power to actually operate them. I also recall the early ones had their own fans and such. Now, they're nothing in size. I have a Tb internal on my Mac and I don't need a bunch of fans or anything to operate it.

Alex