The Steady Progress of Storage

I’m building a Windows Media Center for a home theater setup I’m planning and in the process was installing a new hard drive into the PC.  Before I dropped it into the new machine I was showing it to my son and pulled out an old drive I had for comparison.  I was a little taken aback at the contrast of the two drives below.  The one on the left is a 10 megabyte (MB) Seagate ST-412.  The one on the right is a 1 terabyte (TB) Western Digital Caviar.  In case you’re having trouble doing the math in your head, let me help you out.  1TB is roughly equal to 1,000,000MB. So the drive on the right holds roughly about 100,000 times more data than the one on the left.

Comparison of a 10MB Drive with a 1TB Drive
Click to see the full size photo

 

That Seagate ST-412 on the left is pretty old.  I’ve had it since forever and just use it as a bookend.  For those interested in the history of that drive, that was the first hard drive used in the original IBM PC XT back in 1981.

Good times, good times…  <grumble grumble>

 

Technorati Tags: Storage,Hard drive,megabyte,terabyte,IBM PC-XT