6 ms·
My dad and I replaced a 100MB HDD with a 1GB HDD for $100. When did this happen?
In a very early memory and the start of my obsession with computers, my father upgraded his 100MB hard drive with a 1GB drive for $100 USD. I remember everything about that moment such as the smell of a room packed electronics, how excited my dad was to get what seemed like an inconceivable amount of storage (694 floppies, I remember doing the math), and the exact purchase price and size, $100 and 1GB.
The only thing I don't remember is when this happed. I can't ask my father unfortunately but would love to place this event in time. I remember it was very notable that 1GB could be bought for as low as $100 and it happened at a small local PC sales and repair store located in the US South. 1995 maybe?
- h2odragon 2y ago95 or 96 sounds like a good guess. Recall anything about the drive? was it as big as the old one, or was it 3.5in? its quite likely you got a disk controller with the drive as well, the switch from ST506 to IDE/ATA had happened in the interval.
- brudgers 2y ago100MB sounds like IDE to me. ST506 was "early" and 100MB would have been relatively exotic for a PC user and definitely expensive.
- vichu 2y agoLooking at this chart[0], my guess would be around 1997. [0] https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update
- pestatije 2y ago$100...not the cheapest drive available, so it must have been soon after they were released...id say 1996
- giantg2 2y agoI'd say probably around '97 or '98, possibly a year or so later if that cost included services like labor to do the swap.
- actionfromafar 2y ago$100 has remained a rule of thumb for most space for dollars.
- liquid153 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoWe've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- williamDafoe 2y ago1995 is too early. I am guessing 1998-2004. Was the 1GB drive the state of the art? I was buying my sons 2GB drives in the early 2010s for about $100 - you just didnt need that much storage before games like flight sinulator and forza horizon blew up ...
- BoredPositron 2y agoI would say 1997 and it was probably a maxtor drive :P
- teleforce 2y agoWell done mate, you not only probably get the correct time but the brand as well.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoIt was a Deathstar ("DeskStar" model), most likely, destined for corruptive data spins.
- blindriver 2y ago95 or 96. I replaced my 500MB drive with a 2Gb drive when I was living in a specific apartment during 95/96, most likely 96.
- alchemist1e9 2y agoAm I the only one who feels this type of post isn’t HN worthy?
- dang 2y agoIt shouldn't be the main dish but a little is ok. It's conversational and that's good.
- frankwiles 2y agoIt’s about a cute tech memory, which likely brings back various memories for us all. I think worrying about the worthiness of a tech news site isn’t worthy of our time.
- alchemist1e9 2y agoFeels like there has been a change in either policy or taste though. I’ve been here for a long time, much longer than this account and something if different in maybe last year or so.
- vlasky 2y agoI wouldn't want to see this sort of post everyday, but I thought it was an interesting forensic exercise - kind of like carbon dating. Just for fun, I used ChatGPT 4o to answer the question. It reckoned 1997.
- proactivesvcs 2y agoI had an 81MB (87MB?) 2.5" hard drive for my Acorn Archimedes A3010 circa 1996ish. I'd guess after then and before 2000 - by then I had a proper, grow-up job doing tech support and PC building and I'm sure we rarely, if ever, sold drives in the megabytes.
- juancn 2y agoI remember doing a similar upgrade in 1996 when I was in second year of college. But at that price it has to be 1997 or later which is when we hit a dime per MB.
- hnthrowaway0328 2y agoI think the turn of the century.
- DaveInTucson 2y agoI remember in the early 90s seeing 8 GB hard drives being advertised for sale, and thinking "who on earth would need 8 gigs of hard drive storage?" (Me, that's who. I now have 63+ GB just under my Music folder)
- makz 2y agoYou made me remember something. When I got my first computer it had 4 gb of disk space. I had no internet then. It seemed a huge amount of space. When I got internet, suddenly I filled it up within a month or so
- runlaszlorun 2y ago4GB! such frivolous luxury! my first was actually a timex sinclair. for storage it had… well… 0gb/mb/kb. seriously. It’d boot into Basic and you’d have to type in whatever you wanted it to do. There was some short little game we found in a magazine that involved dodging falling letters. So we’d type it in each time to play. Soon we were doing from memory and that was a pretty good… albeit fairly odd… way to pick up programming!
- neogodless 2y agoIn 1998, I bought a computer from a friend in college. Not sure what the storage was - maybe 2GB. But the next computer was one I built and it had a huge 10GB drive! That might have been 1999.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arh68 2y agoI would wager it was either late 1996 or 1997. Perhaps the drive was used/returned. In '96, it seems ~2 GB ran ~$400. [1] https://notebooks.com/2011/03/09/hard-drive-prices-over-time-price-per-gb-from-1981-to-2010/ https://notebooks.com/2011/03/09/hard-drive-prices-over-time... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100507030742/https://ns1758.ca/winch/winchest.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100507030742/https://ns1758.ca...
- longshotanalyst 2y agoA question is: what kind of computer would have run both a 100meg and 1gig HD? Many computers that would have run a 100meg would have various BIOS or other limitations with a 1gig. Proposed Scenario: The 100meg drive was bought for ~$330 in ~1991. It was brought over during an upgrade to a 486dx2/66 in late 1993/early 1994. Then, in late 1996/early 1997 the 1 gig drive was bought to make space for bigger games and to try to run Win95 on the computer.
- M95D 2y agoMy 486 (PCI system) had a 1GB HDD when most computers were sold with less than 500MB HDD. This was in '96. About 2 years later I installed a second 4GB HDD. There were no compatibility problems, HW or SW.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- eterevsky 2y agoI bought my first PC around 1996. It had a 850 MB hard drive from WD which costed $100 or less. Probably around the same time you upgraded to 1 GB.
- runlaszlorun 2y agoI often find myself using this site for historical numbers: https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm for general reference, there are seperate sites linked to for RAM or SSD prices. Keep in mind, the site I posted lists the absolute cheapest $/MB on the market at that time. I think that’s a useful number in order to have somewhat of a benchmark. But any particular drive (like yours) is prob not the most rock bottom, cheapest per MB. From the numbers listed there, I would’ve guessed 1996 or so.
- bharath1097 2y agoMy father bought our family's first computer in mid 1998. It was assembled by my father's friend. I remember it having a 2GB hard drive that cost the equivalent of around $100 in our local currency.
- lizknope 2y agoI got my first PC (Pentium 90) in September 1994 with a 1GB hard drive. In summer 1995 I bought another 1GB hard drive for $299 Here is an old PC Magazine from October 1998. If you go way in the back (page 352) to the advertisements you can find 1GB hard drives for $105 https://books.google.com/books?id=TodvBDXmM_oC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=TodvBDXmM_oC&printsec=fron...