While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.
It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?
The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.
Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.
Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)
That’s honestly intense. I would be terrified of having that much data in one place
While not hard drives, at $dayjob we bought a new server out with 16 x 64TB nvme drives. We don’t even need the speed of nvme for this machines roll. It was the density that was most appealing.
It feels crazy having a petabytes of storage (albeit with some lost to raid redundancy). Is this what it was like working in tech up till the mid 00s with significant jumps just turning up?
Well hell, it’s not like it’s your money.
This is exactly what it was like, except you didn’t need it as much.
Storage used to cover how much a person needed and maybe 2-8x more, then datasets shot upwards with audio/mp3, then video, then again with Ai.
The size increase in hard drives around that time was insane. Compared to the mid-90’s which was just a decade ago, hard drives capacities increased around 100 times. On average, drive capacities were doubling every year.
Then things slowed down. In the past 20 years, we’ve maybe increased the capacities 30-40 times for hard drives.
Flash memory, on the other hand, is a different story. Sometime around 2002-3 or so I paid something like $45 for my first USB flash drive - a whole 128MB of storage. Today I can buy one that’s literally 1000 times larger, for around a third of that price. (I still have that drive, and it still works too!)
I guess you’re expected to set those up in a RAID 5 or 6 (or similar) setup to have redundancy in case of failure.
Rebuilding after a failure would be a few days of squeaky bum time though.
At raid6, rebuilds are 4.2 roentgens, not great but they’re not horrible. Keep old backups.but the data isn’t irreplaceable.
Raid5 is suicide if you care about your data.