My How Things Have Changed

I just picked up a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk.  That's an external hard drive with a 2TB (2,000 gigabytes) that cost just $99 and change at Costco.  It is quiet, reasonably fast and could be faster if I replaced the USB 2.0 interface with the optional Firewire 800, USB 3.0 or eSata interfaces.

Anyway, thinking of how large this is, especially for the price made me remember my first hard drives.

I was thrilled to get a 40MB external hard drive for my Amiga A1000.  I think it was about US$400 at the time.

My first PC Clone had a 30MB internal hard drive, and I saved for a long time to buy the 112MB 5.25" full height RLL hard drive that I used for data storage.

Now I look at some of the stuff I'm putting on the drive... a back issue of a magazine in PDF format that takes up 50MB of space.  It wouldn't have even fit on my first Amiga hard drive. Now I carry a thumb drive in my pocket that'd hold 26 YEARS worth of those issues.  The new GoFlex would hold over 3,300 years worth of the magazine!

The box shows that it'll hold 400,000 pictures from a 10 megapixel camera (mine is 7.1), 500,000 average MP3 music files or 240 hours of HD video.

Damn!

As a footnote, I'll point out that it has been decades since I got a new hard drive and said "I'll NEVER be able to fill that."