5 ms·

My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of t

My first computer had a 7GB hard drive. At that time we had CDs with ~700mb capacity. Now we routinely have 1TB storage and games are 70GB. As a percentage of total storage these are similar. I'm not sure how the download rate of 70GB compares to the read speed of a CD but installs took a while back in the day as well.

throwaway744678 4y ago
"Patch day, no play!"
TylerE 4y ago
I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.
314 4y ago
I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.
- BackBlast 4y ago
  The limiting factor of the CD/DVD drives was seek time, not read speed. Seeking a spot on the disk was on the order of 150ms. You basically got 5-7 read OPS. The best drive I remember stood out at 120ms seek, some would be over 200ms seek. Sometimes this was a hard number to track down. Even with a 48x drive, installation could easily still take 30+ minutes particularly if the installer wasn't optimized for sequential read off a flat file. Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience. As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.

throwaway744678 4y ago

"Patch day, no play!"

TylerE 4y ago

I had a cdrom drive in a 486 with 8mb of RAM and ~200MB of disk. I could either have a game or two installed (which at the time invariably ran in DOS) or Windows 3.1 installed. Not both. At the time it was like… wait I just bought this fancy CD-ROM… why do I need to install 30 or 40 whole megabytes to disk to play it? At that time it was pretty common to actually install all the game files to disk (drives were slow… I think it was 4x read speed) and then the music was encoded in the cd as additional tracks of plain CD audio.

314 4y ago

I don't have the fastest internet connection but downloads from steam sit happily at 30MB/s so in an hour I can download 108GB of data. The earliest cdroms that I remember were 1x drives - so it took an hour to read that 700MB. Obviously drive speeds increased tremendously over the lifespan of cdrom (did it reach 48x?), but compared to the earliest generation it is about the same.

BackBlast 4y ago
The limiting factor of the CD/DVD drives was seek time, not read speed. Seeking a spot on the disk was on the order of 150ms. You basically got 5-7 read OPS. The best drive I remember stood out at 120ms seek, some would be over 200ms seek. Sometimes this was a hard number to track down. Even with a 48x drive, installation could easily still take 30+ minutes particularly if the installer wasn't optimized for sequential read off a flat file. Sometimes you got a really bad installer, and it could take a pretty grueling 2+ hours. Some companies chose to optimize for space (thus cost..) rather than user experience. As space got more plentiful it would sometimes be easier to copy the disk and remount it and then install.