3 ms·
For the sake of comparing apples to apples, the 10MB disk in 1980 that cost $3400 would now cost almost $11,000, whereas the price of a modern 18TB HDD is $400.
by geocrasher 6y ago
For the sake of comparing apples to apples, the 10MB disk in 1980 that cost $3400 would now cost almost $11,000, whereas the price of a modern 18TB HDD is $400.
You could buy 27 18TB disks for the price of that 10MB disk in 1980. I didn't do the math, but at first glance, it sounds impressive. But even if your mirrored all 27 disks, you'd still not approach a reasonable gain of IOPS/GiB. It really is fascinating to compare!
- spijdar 6y agoHard drive progression is definitely interesting. I don't have any numbers, but I have an old SPARC laptop from 1995, with dual slim SCSI drives from IBM. Thin little drives from the early 90s, going from 300-900 MB. And man, those things have aged phenomenally well. The controller could read both at 10MB/s each simultaneously, with seek speeds of only around 14 ms, not that far from the 5 mentioned in the article. I really don't think the HDDs in my modern laptops are more than at most a single order of magnitude superior in anything except storage density.
- geocrasher 6y agoI would agree with that. Today I replaced an 11 year old Western Digital Green 500GB HDD with a new Seagate 2TB HDD. The WD Green still runs fine! But, it's 11 years old. That's a long time in HDD years. Its brother is a 10 year old Seagate 500GB HDD which, as soon as it's done copying to the 2TB disk, is also being retired. But you never know, I might pull them out of retirement at any point for a non critical project. They're both in excellent shape. And unless you change to SSD, the technology hasn't change so much in the last decade that these things are garbage.
- zokier 6y agoOn the other hand you can buy 1TB of RAM for that $11k also, I don't know how many "IOPS" that would get you but I bet its a lot.