The size of my Sider

[Keatah]

(cross posted in computers science technology forum)

 

Years and years ago, in the late 70's or early 80's a UPS truck came by and dropped off my spanking new Sider hard disk drive! It was a whopping 10Megs in size. I had absolutely no clue as to what I would do with the capability of having 70 floppy disks instantly accessible. Well that didn't take long, I gave my 2-floppy drive BBS a HUGE upgrade.

 

I remember this drive coming in a large carton, like a small treasure chest sized box. And it was heavy. In order to get it to my room I tied a rope around the box and pulled it up the stairs. This was simply too heavy (and BIG) for me to carry safely. Well now, yesterday, the UPS truck came by again! And this time a small padded envelope mailer arrived, and inside was another hard disk. This one is 1TB is size. And on it is stored music and pictures and classic emulation stuff, along with my journal. All well and good.

 

But *this* drive (WD Elements SE portable) fits nicely in your pocket and doesn't dim the lights briefly when you turn it on, or, rather, connect it to the USB port. Yeh, my old Sider drive briefly made the lights flicker a bit when you flipped the power switch. It sounded like a muted jet-powered sled on rails. It had a ribbon cable assembly wider than my girlfriend's belt. And the power cord was so thick and stiff and round I used a hair dryer to soften it up so it could snake around the surge suppressor. And the tiny new drive, well, you have to touch it to try and feel the vibration or put it in direct contact with your ear in an anechoic quiet room to hear it. It is that quiet.

 

And I got to thinking. How many Sider drives can *THIS* 1TB drive hold. Well it turns out after doing the calculations that it would take 2 Boeing-747 freighters to carry enough of the old drives to measure up to this tiny 1TB wonder! 2 fully-loaded cargo jets. The new tiny drive costs me a morning's work in terms of U.S. Dollars. Back in the day, storing that much data via a consumer product such as the Sider, would have cost one-third the value of the entire aircarft! Frakking incredible don't you think?