$200 for a blue case?
So an extra $200 for a blue brushed finished case? really?
Samsung has introduced a 2TB T5 portable SSD you can stick in your shirt pocket. It comes in metallic blue with 250GB and 500GB capacities and black for 1TB and 2TB versions. It measures 74 x 57.3 x 10.5mm and weighs 51g, although precise weight varies by capacity. That's smaller than the average portable disk drive. …
Memory from a users group meeting: used hard drives for a dollar a meg.
My memory from a user group meeting long ago was a harddisk throwing competition. That was in the days of full height 5.25" drives :). This newfangled stuff would probably work in a competition to see how many times you could make it skip on a lake before it sunk, but I fear they won't fail in sufficient numbers to make that possible.
That said, these drives have a major advantage with their absence of moving parts - I may grab a few and see how well they age. They may be useful for storage*, and USB 3.1 makes them quite zippy to fill.
* No, not as a tape replacement because the cost per GB is still at the "stupid" level compared to tape. But for long term crypto key storage I think they could be just what we want because it's certain that if we need to go back to a older stored copy we'll be in a damn hurry..
Circa 1995 I purchased one of the first 100Mb.* HDDs imported into my country. The price was eye watering! In the vicinity of three thousand Euros, if my memory doesn't fail me.
People would come from other offices and companies to watch "The Beast", and in those days I heard lots of conversations starting with "remember when...?"
Six or seven years after that you could buy a memory stick of a bigger capacity for peanuts.
Interesting times, indeed!
OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine. It also came with a DEC engineer to install it, and after it was setup I was left with 400MB and change. So lesson learned that day: never believe the quoted storage capacity.
OK, I'll bite. In my first job I had to buy a DEC hard drive for a VAX 11/750. It cost £14K (and that's when £ bought stuff) and gave 600MB (yes that's an M). Size of a washing machine.
If you look here http://s3.computerhistory.org/groups/cdc-9760-smd.pdf you'll see a chart listing the drives at the first place I worked: 300 MB CDC removable disk packs. Each disk pack cost US$10,000. There were ten platters, with two $500 read/write heads each, for another $10,000. The drive enclosures were, yes, the size of a washing machine, and like a washing machine had to be properly set up or they would walk around the room when turned on. (Guess how I know this.) We had three of them and a total of seven data disk packs, as we were just small fry. An engineering disk pack, required to realign the read-write heads should we have to replace or even just move them for any reason, cost $25,000; we had one of those. (For those keeping count in the back, that's US$95,000 just for the disk packs...) If there was a head crash, we'd have to replace the disk pack and all 20 heads and realign with the engineering pack. In the years I was there we replaced three disk packs. That's $30,000, for a total of $125,000 on just the disk packs, plus another $30,000 for replacing the read-write heads.) We actually got about 250 MB storage on them, until they were replaced on a one-for-one basis, by then brand new 800 MB fixed drives, also from CDC and also listed in that PDF.
@RosslynDad
"OK, I'll bite."
Hehe... In the late 80s, I worked (read, apprentice) for a pre-press (printing) company. When the company upgraded from analogue equipment to digital, the roof had to be taken off the building, and the new digital equipment lowered in with a crane (Crown Street, Surry Hills, Sydney -AU).
No idea about the cost.
:)
Circa 1995 I purchased one of the first 100Mb.* HDDs imported into my country.
1991 or 1992 we had various systems at work, 486's and early Pentia, an RS/6000, some PA/Risc system, mVAXes, a few Alphas and some Suns, the disk sizes on a few of them tickling 1GB. Also around then I bought a whopping 500MB SCSI harddisk for a whopping dfl.2500.
The price was eye watering! In the vicinity of three thousand Euros, if my memory doesn't fail me.
Converted? Won't have been Euros, then, but sounds painfully expensive.
"I thought the whole point was to make external storage affordable."
The point behind the point is that you gotta start somewhere.
"Oh please. What's even the point of that??"
If you need to transfer lots of data in a big hurry and still keep it in your pocket (say you have a flight to catch). Having built-in password protection helps, and I would think you can still go paranoid and use separate volume encryption if you gotta.
And expensive enough to replace your internal SSD with a much bigger, much faster one and run your VM even better off of that.
Just thinking the same. My 1TB NVMe SSD which runs at 2GB/s read speed cost less than that. Yes it's twice the storage but I think with SATA storage we are currently being gouged with unjustifiable prices for portable devices so they can make hay before the combine harvester falls off the cliff. I have a feeling prices for these devices will pootle along for a bit before taking a permanent nose dive.
They are awesome little things. The T1 was plastic, the T3 is a mix of plastic and aluminium. And yes, I use these for virtual machine (and software) storage. The new T5 should be even more fun, although I suspect the T3 price will drop (at which point it makes sense to buy more of them).