A long (long) time ago when I was first adding hard drives to my systems—yes, there was a time when computers didn’t come with hard drives—the only choices available to “normal people” were 20MB or 60MB drives. That was the good news. The bad news was that they cost several hundred dollars and almost always broke within a year or two. If you reached 3 years, it was a real victory.
Happily, things are very different now. Consumer grade drives of a few terabytes are now commonplace and cost less than those 60MB drives I used to buy. Any self-respecting high end laptop probably has a at least a terabyte of disk storage. And did I mention the drives will probably live longer than the computers they’re attached to?
But things move on. Western Digital just announced that they are “sampling” 32TB drives. That seems like a lot of storage and it is. The drives are using a couple of cutting edge technologies but it won’t be long before the younger members of our community won’t understand how anyone got along with less than 32TB on their laptops.
There’s really no point to this post except to celebrate the ever increasing capability of the technology we use. Just a few years ago, what we have now would have been unimaginable even on a mainframe. It makes me wonder what we’ll using in, say, 20 years. What I’m hoping for is a “laptop” on my cell phone that I can plug into a real keyboard and screen to have what I now have on my MacBook but still use by itself when I’m away from home. I’m sure it’s on its way.