| Some amazing numbers!
Here's a posting I made on a forum when I saw a $200 One Terabyte disk for sale:
The first hard disk I used was on a high school computer that two friends and I picked out for the school (Choate) in 1968.
It was a Digital Equipment Corp. 'PDP-8e', had 12K bytes of core memory (you could clearly see the 1-bit cores themselves!), a high speed paper tape ready ( 300 chars/sec ) and punch, and a hard disk that cost more than the computer itself.
The disk was 14" x 7" x 24" in size (volume 2352 cu. in.), and held..... 48 K bytes. (Not M bytes)
I saw a One Terabyte disk on sale last week for about $195 including tax. And it measured probably 0.75" x 4" x 6" (volume 18 cu. in.) That's about 100 times cheaper than the PDP-8's disk.
That's 130 times less volume, and 20.8 MILLION times the storage.
AND the effective data density would be about 2.7 BILLION times as much.
AND 270 BILLION times lower cost per byte.
That's an amazing shrinkage in 40 years!
( Not to mention the speed... )
If you consider Moore's Law (transistors double every 18 months), over 40 years, that would be a transistor increase of 2^26 = ONLY 67 Million times better.
Looks like the hard disk guys are WAY AHEAD of the chip designers!
Amazing!
William | 
Linear Mode
