Computer Data Storage Technology Improvement in 12 Years

[brockrwood]

The 2011 Seagate hard drive is on the right. The 2023 Samsung microSD card is on the left.

Incredible. And the microSD card costs less than the hard drive, even without adjusting for inflation.

 

[Rocketjunkie]

I've got 2 10 TB drives in this computer. Bought in 2019. The only thing I've seen greatly improve in the last 10 years is solid state memory. This computer's C drive is a 2 TB SSD. My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with 256 KB RAM, 8 MHz 80186, and a 8 color 640x400 display running DOS 2.0. It still was $3500 in 1983 $. An original IBM PC was about the same price. A 5MB hard drive for the Tandy was another $1000.

 

[bjphoenix]

I've got 2 10 TB drives in this computer. Bought in 2019. The only thing I've seen greatly improve in the last 10 years is solid state memory. This computer's C drive is a 2 TB SSD. My first computer was a Tandy 2000 with 256 KB RAM, 8 MHz 80186, and a 8 color 640x400 display running DOS 2.0. It still was $3500 in 1983 $. An original IBM PC was about the same price. A 5MB hard drive for the Tandy was another $1000.

Maybe we've talked about this before-
My first PC was the original IBM PC bought in early 1980s. It had 256kb RAM, monochrome display and 2 floppy drives. I think it cost around $3500. Later I was in Austin looking around in this tiny little computer store and they had hard drive kits for sale. They had a full height 10MB kit for $400 and a 20MB half height kit for $450. I had not idea what I would use the additional storage for of the 20 vs 10 but I bought the 20MB kit. Well famous last words... eventually I bought a second 20MB drive, then took both of those out and replaced by a single 60MB RLL drive, then a 105MB IDE drive, then 383MB ESDI, then a 676MB ESDI. Now my desktop computer has a 1TB SSD boot drive and a 4TB SSD data drive. I have a couple of 5TB portable mechanical drives for backup. Maybe 5 years ago I was using 2TB portable mechanical drives for backup. I showed one to my wife and told her it had 100,000 times as much storage as my first hard drive and quite a bit smaller maybe 1/10 the size. Solid state storage is really crazy- what you can store on a microSD card. Size for size I think it is even a higher density than what my 4TB SSD drive is.

 

[heada]

I just implemented a 36PiB storage cluster in a single 19" data center rack today. 1PiB = 1024 TiB, 1TiB = 1024 GiB, 1 GiB = 1024 MiB Globally I manage ~300 PiB for a large pharma company. Vast majority of the data stored is gene sequencing. My first drive was a 5MiB full height MFM IBM drive on my 4Mhz XT in 1983

 

[brockrwood]

Maybe we've talked about this before-
My first PC was the original IBM PC bought in early 1980s. It had 256kb RAM, monochrome display and 2 floppy drives. I think it cost around $3500. Later I was in Austin looking around in this tiny little computer store and they had hard drive kits for sale. They had a full height 10MB kit for $400 and a 20MB half height kit for $450. I had not idea what I would use the additional storage for of the 20 vs 10 but I bought the 20MB kit. Well famous last words... eventually I bought a second 20MB drive, then took both of those out and replaced by a single 60MB RLL drive, then a 105MB IDE drive, then 383MB ESDI, then a 676MB ESDI. Now my desktop computer has a 1TB SSD boot drive and a 4TB SSD data drive. I have a couple of 5TB portable mechanical drives for backup. Maybe 5 years ago I was using 2TB portable mechanical drives for backup. I showed one to my wife and told her it had 100,000 times as much storage as my first hard drive and quite a bit smaller maybe 1/10 the size. Solid state storage is really crazy- what you can store on a microSD card. Size for size I think it is even a higher density than what my 4TB SSD drive is.

I wonder what the total amount of electronic data stored, worldwide, was when you bought your IBM PC? I bet it could not have been more than a few terabytes.

 

[cls]

I wonder what the total amount of electronic data stored, worldwide, was when you bought your IBM PC? I bet it could not have been more than a few terabytes.

there were petabytes in tape libraries, thousands around the world.

I worked on a giant library "storage silo" machine that held thousands of 3490 cartridges (200MB each). the robot arm would pick, mount, and restack the carts. after the 1989 earthquake, they added bar code reader to the robot arm. all those tapes came loose, what a mess.

 

[shockie]

My 1st data storage device was a 8" floppy diskette

 

[heada]

there were petabytes in tape libraries, thousands around the world.

I worked on a giant library "storage silo" machine that held thousands of 3490 cartridges (200MB each). the robot arm would pick, mount, and restack the carts. after the 1989 earthquake, they added bar code reader to the robot arm. all those tapes came loose, what a mess.

Early 2000's I had an IBM 3494 library with 16x 3590 drives. Library held 3000 or 4000 tapes I think. Each tape at that time was ~50GiB. That library was connected to a bunch of RS/6000s We also had 4x 3490 drives connected to the AS/400. I didn't manage it but one of the other sites had STK Silos. Powderhorns I think.

With all the cheap storage we have in the world today, I wouldn't be surprised if we've surpassed a yottabyte now.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled full of backup tapes"

 

[cls]

Early 2000's I had an IBM 3494 library with 16x 3590 drives. Library held 3000 or 4000 tapes I think. Each tape at that time was ~50GiB.

That's amazing!! What was stored, financial data? Scientific stuff?

 

[cls]

With all the cheap storage we have in the world today, I wouldn't be surprised if we've surpassed a yottabyte now.

Don't forget the "Utah Data Center" of 5 Eyes spy data. Everything that happens, everywhere on earth.

 

[heada]

That's amazing!! What was stored, financial data? Scientific stuff?

Business in the "Medical Device" part of healthcare so some medical, some scientific but mostly boring business records (testing, manufacturing lot info, etc.) that legally has to be kept "30 years plus the life of the product" Ever wonder how the FDA can order a recall for stuff made decades ago? There's your answer.

 

[heada]

Don't forget the "Utah Data Center" of 5 Eyes spy data. Everything that happens, everywhere on earth.

The NSA datacenter in Utah is full of the same storage that I deployed today. Extremely fast and dense, but not very cheap. Obviously they have a wee bit more than I do.

The 36PiB I deployed today has 220x 25Gb/s interfaces for read/write access by a few high performance compute clusters (20,000+ core clusters)

 

[brockrwood]

Early 2000's I had an IBM 3494 library with 16x 3590 drives. Library held 3000 or 4000 tapes I think. Each tape at that time was ~50GiB. That library was connected to a bunch of RS/6000s We also had 4x 3490 drives connected to the AS/400. I didn't manage it but one of the other sites had STK Silos. Powderhorns I think.

With all the cheap storage we have in the world today, I wouldn't be surprised if we've surpassed a yottabyte now.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled full of backup tapes"

Had to look up “yottabyte”. One septillion bytes. Oh my goodness! That is 1 x 10^24 bytes. That’s a lot of bytes.

 

[cls]

The 36PiB I deployed today has 220x 25Gb/s interfaces for read/write access

Ok, back of envelope... 25Gbps * 220 / 8 = 687.5 GBps;
36PiB (36*1024^5) would take about 6E13 seconds to read completely. 1.9 million years. Hmmm.

 

[bjphoenix]

Ok, back of envelope... 25Gbps * 220 / 8 = 687.5 GBps;
36PiB (36*1024^5) would take about 6E13 seconds to read completely. 1.9 million years. Hmmm.

What's your hurry?

 

[heada]

Ok, back of envelope... 25Gbps * 220 / 8 = 687.5 GBps;
36PiB (36*1024^5) would take about 6E13 seconds to read completely. 1.9 million years. Hmmm.

I think your math is slightly off. Your conversion from PiB was to B, not GiB. It should have been 1024^2

(25*220 Gib per sec) /8 bits per byte = 687.5 GiB/s

36PiB * 1024 (TiB per PiB) * 1024 (GiB per TiB)=37,748,736 GiB

37748736 GiB / 687.5 GiB per sec = 54,907 sec

54,907 sec / 3,600 (sec per hour) 15.25 hours

This cluster can be filled almost twice per day. In this location I have 3 similar clusters.

1 gene sequence run is about 3 PiB and about 1.4 billion files. There are several studies happening concurrently at any time.

*edit: fixed a unit

 

[OverTheTop]

My 1st data storage device was a 8" floppy diskette

Mine was cassette tape.

 

[heada]

Mine was cassette tape.

TI 99/4A?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A

I had one of those....ah, fun times

 

[OverTheTop]

TI 99/4A?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A

I had one of those....ah, fun times

No. 2650 computer built from Radio Electronics articles.

 

[jgarbus]

Storage has come quite a ways over the years and while SSD is starting to pick up drastically in data centers, spinning drives are still being deployed probably 10-1 because of the long history of reliability. I've been in the data center buisness my entire life and the last year has made some ridiculous strides.

Over the last 6-12 months cabinet capacity has gone as high as 150kW per cabinet with the GPU and liquid cooling. These cabinets are typically 60/30 split with 30% still air cooled because memory still hasn't been well implemented in liquid cooling. As soon as they fix that these cabinets will be pulling 200kW easily.

Were now delivering 8 to 10 3 phase 480v power circuits to these cabinets. That's an incredibly dense package.

 

[cls]

I think your math is slightly off. Your conversion from PiB was to B, not GiB. It should have been 1024^2

Oh, duh! Thanks!

Regardless, a big hulk of hardware. Fun.

 

[lr64]

snip
.. wouldn't be surprised if we've surpassed a yottabyte now.
snip

Went on a trip to Quebec in black fly season and had a yottabytes just on me. And that was decades ago.
----------
My first computer had 1k of RAM. Somehow, I managed to make hundreds of solder joints for all the chips in it correctly. Not worth bothering with, though. I didn't even know it worked until we found a TV it got along with. I think the extra memory you could buy put it up to 4k.
---------
Software has kept pace, though. Despite the tremendous advances in hardware performance, we still end up waiting for computers to boot up. At one time, I could do quite a few useful things with a computer that had only 128k of RAM.

 

[Lord Rory Gin]

My 1st data storage device was a 8" floppy diskette

Mine was a tape data recorder for a Radio Shack 32k CoCo connected to the Internet via a 300 baud modem! And it was GLORIOUS!

 

[cerving]

67 MB RM03 disk drive, cir. 1980. Used with DEC PDP/11 systems... had this funky SMD interface with a bunch of really fat cables. It was about the size (and weight) of a washing machine, with 14" disks that rotated in a pressurized chamber at 10,000 RPM or so. They were VERY vibration sensitive... a little nudge could cause a head strike on the platters, destroying the magnetic coating and making a whole lot of really loud screeching noises.

I was really glad when we got rid of those things and got "Winchester" drives... I got really tired of these things crashing every 3 months and having to restore the contents of the disk from a zillion 1600 bpi 10 1/2" reel mag tapes.

 

[vcp]

http://oldcomputers.net/heathkit-h8.html

Started with 8080 4k + cassette
ended with Z80 64K + 2x 8" DSDD disks

 

[brockrwood]

OK, while we are doing “old guy my first computer was” stories, my friend in college had a Tandy CoCo, with a cassette tape drive, but I resisted buying a computer until 1991. I bought a 286-12 clone with a 5.25” floppy drive, MS-DOS 3.3, 1 meg of RAM (640K and 384K “extended” memory), and a huge 40 megabyte hard drive. The 40 megger was partitioned into a 30 mb drive and a 10 mb drive because DOS could not address a drive larger than about 30 mb.

It came with a VGA monitor.

I ran “Empire: Wargame of the Century” and WordPerfect on this rig. I thought I was styling. The computer and monitor cost about $1,200. That was more than I paid for my car (1972 orange Super Beetle).

 

[OverTheTop]

I ran “Empire: Wargame of the Century” and WordPerfect on this rig.

I still run WordPerfect. Great program.

For my 2650 computer I put on a floppy drive (had to build the controller) which was a full-height MPI flipfront. Very leading-edge design at the time. I then upgraded to two half-height Panasonics.

Around then (early 80's) I got a TRS-80 knock-off (DSE System 80) and after adding floppys to that decided to add a HDD. I designed a controller and added a 20MB drive, but got 30MB out of it with RLL encoding.

 

[OverTheTop]

67 MB RM03 disk drive, cir. 1980. Used with DEC PDP/11 systems... had this funky SMD interface with a bunch of really fat cables. It was about the size (and weight) of a washing machine, with 14" disks that rotated in a pressurized chamber at 10,000 RPM or so.

I still have an old RL01 disk pack. 14" removable. We used to use them on our tram, bus and train control systems here.

 

[Sandy H.]

Well, my first computer that was 'mine' was also a Tandy CoCo with a cassette drive. It was purchased for the family (dad had his own TRS-80's) and everybody didn't like it, so it got moved to my homework room and I was pretty much the only person who used it. I was allowed to play games on it with one caveat - I had to enter the programs from the back of some magazine (Byte, I think, but its been too long). I remember the magazine would come, dad would read it and then I'd go to the back for the free program and you'd type in the code. I think some of them were multiple months long to get the full program.

My first laptop was a Tandy model 100 (I think) which had 3 or 4 lines on the display and could be powered by D batteries.

Dad and I built a 486SX with parts we picked out from the Pionex store in Georgia before I went to college. We put a Segate SCSI drive in it, maybe 20gb, but not 100% sure of that - it was 1993 and the computer was so blazingly fast that when I would play Wolfenstein 3D, I had to turn the turbo button off, lol. . .

I built a few other decent desktops over the years, had a Logitec force feedback steering wheel mounted to a wooden frame with a go-kart seat for my 'racing simulator' that went to a GIANT 43" rear projection SDTV.

Since then, I've only had laptops and all are HP zBook or similar spec with only memory or HDD upgrades. Oldest one of those I use on a daily basis was bought in 2010.

As far as the thread topic, the capacities mentioned by certain posts and the volume of data is so amazingly unbelievable, I'd say it was false information if a stranger told me. Knowing the depth and experience of the membership here, I am sure it is all fact, but it still falls into the "Man, that's unbelievable" category. If I had a nickel for every terabyte of storage on the planet. . . wow!

 

[cls]

My first laptop was a Tandy model 100 (I think) which had 3 or 4 lines on the display and could be powered by D batteries.

I have one! Still working. Doesn't know about year 2000. It's powered by 4 AA batteries, and runs for weeks on a set.