Mildly Interesting

what's the one on the right?

I remember all the formats shown.

My first machine was an AST Research 286 16Mhz (in "turbo" mode) with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, and a 40 MB 5-1/4" hard drive. I paid ~$2000 for it in the late 80s. That was a good move, I knew more about computers than most people applying for jobs at the time, and that allowed me to make a decent living without a college degree.

5MB of storage in 1956.

Oldest hard drives I've dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.

I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.

Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they're getting this small.

I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they're all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.

And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra

I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.

Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.

Wait, 1tb?

You're leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.

Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.

I think I have two I could put on the left side. A "full-height" 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don't remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.

It really is amazing, and just popping an m.2 into a motherboard directly is just so... easy. And I think Gen5s are what, 2.5x faster than what you're showing here?

In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100's of kg range.

Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven't been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.

It'd be gnar if the smallest one was also a magnetic platter hard drive.

The smallest old style hard drive I can think of is the iPod. But now I want to know if any magnetic platter drives got smaller than that... 🤔

Afaik, it's all been solid state after that. Even newer iPods.

Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?

And it will continue...

Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50€.

We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)

The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.

You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.

And they all last until about the same date

Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.

The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).