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.
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:
I'm missing the following:
Never used 9-track tapes, punch cards, or removable disk multipacks.
EDIT Don't know how I forgot about cartridges (Atari 400 and 2600 - still got em!) and CDROM/DVD/WORM. I have CDROM, DVDROM (in various formats), but no WORM media (i.e. IBM 3363 - a CDROM in a rigid case, before the official CD standard was created).
You need a Jazz drive and a mean looking 20mb MFM hard drive that didn't have auto parking.
Syquest cartridges.
Funny how optical discs made it onto none of your lists
Just a brain fart. I've edited my post to reflect them.
Magneto-optical. Even better.
Off the top of my mind, stuff that I've used and still have lying around:
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.
I didn't consider hard drives (spinning rust or SSD) because they're generally internal/permanent devices. (although I do have a SATA dock sitting on my desk.)
Hmm. It gets more complicated the more I think about it.
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