this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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Computer drive sizes over the years (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 day ago by ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!

Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.

So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Meanwhile I'm traveling soon and "packing" microSDs, like... 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It's ridiculous!

I considered buying the 2To ones ... but I don't even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it's to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don't even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.

[–] nibbler@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge...

I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it's the root of the name "core dump" etc :D

[–] frank_exchange_of_views@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Kind of hard to see the scale, but the drive that this removable platter would go into, took the full width of a 19" rack.

It once held several megabytes, but now it's a decoration in my office.

[–] RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.

[–] __dev@lemmy.world 10 points 7 hours ago

The one on the very right is NVMe.

[–] swordgeek@lemmy.ca 6 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

I've got a full-height 5 1/4" 1GB hard drive around here. Thing is massive.

I've also got most of the storage devices I've ever used over the decades:

  • 5 1/4" floppy
  • 3 1/2" floppy
  • 4mm DAT tape
  • 8mm DAT tape
  • 1/4" QIC tape
  • Zip disk
  • Cassette tape
  • Punched tape

I'm missing the following:

  • DLT tape
  • 8" floppy
  • IBM 2315 disk pack

Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago

Off the top of my mind, stuff that I've used and still have lying around:

  • 5.25" floppies (DSDD, Commodore 64; I think I may have a few HD floppies for PC but I'm not sure if I have a drive for them)
  • 3.5" floppies (HD and some DD, mostly for PC; I have a few PC carcasses that have floppy drives, but I do also have a working USB floppy drive)
  • Cassette tapes (Spectravideo, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64)
  • ROM cartridges (same as above, plus game consoles)
  • Iomega Zip (not sure if the Zip floppies I have have anything relevant; the USB Zip drive is in box somewhere)
  • Iomega Jaz (two disks; not sure if the drive I was actually working last time I used it, could be completely hosed by now, Iomega didn't exactly have a good reputation)
  • A few IDE/PATA hard drives (not sure of the condition)
  • Bunch of CD/DVD/rewritables, I think I have a few unused CD-Rs/DVD-Rs too, never had a Blu-Ray drive for computers
  • USB sticks and hard drives of various descriptions
  • microSD cards used with Raspberry Pi

Funny thing is, I think I have no extra SATA hard drives and modern SSDs lying around, because most of the computers I have that use them are still in operation.

[–] myotheraccount@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

Magneto-optical. Even better.

[–] Zedd_Prophecy@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn't have auto parking.

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

Syquest cartridges.

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 2 points 14 hours ago

I've actually got a little stack of punch cards. It's a program my dad wrote when he was in college, he gave it to me when I started programming

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 points 15 hours ago

It’s a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago

[–] bluesheep@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The left most one is also an HDD? It looks like what I imagine a tape drive would look like but searching for them shows very different results lol

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 10 points 22 hours ago

Its actually a smaller one too. Those 5 1/4 HDDs could be 2 bays tall.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 23 hours ago

For tape look up LTO or LTO-WORM.
That is the current industry standard (afaik).

[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world -5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Women had it good back then.

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I don't understand what you mean could you elaborate?

[–] Corn@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago

Size matters.

[–] And009@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

T'was big

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The drives were big?

[–] And009@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 4 hours ago

Warm and heavy too, older ones even leak.

[–] nonentity@sh.itjust.works 88 points 1 day ago (3 children)

5MB of storage in 1956.

5MB storage in 1956

[–] the_trash_man@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

You could probably store more in a filing cabinet with paper

[–] Dicska@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Imagine the smug face of the first adopters of 3.5" disks, thinking it would easily fit on 4 floppies! Heck, even 15x5.25" ones are so much smaller...

[–] Sabin10@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That would hold 1.66 copies of war and peace.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ASCII wasn't around then, so it would perhaps be stored in 5-bit ITA2, or 6/7-bit FIELDATA. So likely a 5/8 to 7/8 space savings (unless the numbers are for compressed War and Peace).

[–] WillFord27@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They could've just compressed it using 7zip. Text files compress really small!

/j

[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 13 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

A space ship descends and lands outside my door, and and a benevolent Alien pops out and hands me a 512 MB USB stick.

"I crafted this for your species, and made sure it's compatible with your hardware standards. It contains the sum total knowledge of all life in the universe and can be used to accelerate your species to the next plane of existence."

I thank him tearfully and he departs with a warm smile, ascending back up into the soon-to-be-knowable cosmos from when he came.

I plug the stick into my machine, and check out the directory. Inside are two files:

 105 MB   knowledge.tar.piidx
 328 KB   README.txt

I open up the readme file to learn more about the PIIDX file format so that I can uncompress the sum total knowledge of all existence. General gist:

  • Uses a compression algorithm with an infinite dictionary based on prime numbers
  • Uses a storage/retrieval algorithm based on the digits of Pi

Realise quickly that the file will never be opened in my lifetime

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[–] SolidShake@lemmy.world 101 points 1 day ago (5 children)

And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra

[–] nef@slrpnk.net 12 points 1 day ago

To their credit as of 4 years ago all their devices come with high-speed SSDs, the issue is they charge 5x market price for storage and RAM size upgrades.

[–] warm@kbin.earth 68 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Their customers buy it, so they arent changing that

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 43 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wait, 1tb?

You're leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we'll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.

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