Hitachi 1TB drive brings back the memories

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 06 January 2007 13:52

Opinion and Analysis

We now know both Seagate and Hitachi plan to bring 1TB drives to market in the first half of 2006, and whichever one actually manages to do it first now that the challenge is out, this 50 year milestone is one that brings back the memories of the fist gigabyte hard drive after years of living in a world of megabytes.

For kids today, hard drives are tens and hundreds of gigabytes in size, with some already used to home storage networks of well over a terabyte and more. But in the late 80s and 90s, we all lived in a megabyte world. One of the first hard drives was the size of a washing machine and stored a whopping 5mb. Well, whopping in those days.

My first hard drive when I was a kid was 30mb in size and cost AUD $800. But using a special RLL card, which was sold to us with the drive, it could double the size of the hard drive though some kind of special hardware based compression – and so I had 60mb at my disposal.

It was connected to an IBM XT clone. 30mb was for me – and the other 30mb was for my BBS (a kind of Internet for one person at a time in one city (although some of the biggest BBS’s in the US had 50 dial in lines at the same time, they were the early Internet of the 80s and early 90s before the Internet itself really started taking off in 94-95).

My BBS was called Percom BBS (the brand name of the clone I was using at the time!) running on BBS software Opus 1.0. I somehow managed to convince my parents to let me run a BBS from our phone line at home (as second phone lines were very expensive in the 80s, there was no VoIP back then!) with the BBS running from 9pm to 7am. Every day.

I can’t remember exactly how long it ran for. From memory, at least a year. I even got my first taste of online gaming, getting semi-addicted to a text based space trading and fighting game called TradeWars. It cost AUD $20 per month to belong to this BBS, which was a lot of money in those days, but I joined and played this game for at least a couple of months throughout the week at night time for an hour or two.

Quite amazing to think that you could do online gaming back then, albeit in a text based world. Today’s World of Warcraft, Unreal Tournaments, online games of Halo and much more provide all the visuals you could ever desire – and they’ll only get better and more realistic as technology improves and the size of hard drives gets bigger.

Anyway, when I was using this 30mb drive, the dream was for a 1 gigabyte hard drive. That seemed amazing enough in itself to achieve, as a kid, even though I knew there’d eventually be much bigger drives.

Of course, once we reached 1GB, it wasn’t long before that grew in size, too. Remember 10Gb hard drives? There’s one in the original Xbox. They don’t sell them that small anymore, at least not in 3.5-inch sizes. Probably 1-inch hard drives sell at this size, although I’m aware they already have units holding 12Gb, 1.8-inch hard drives have reached 100Gb, 2.5-inch hard drives already store 200Gb, with more storage capacity on the way.

The 1TB drive will soon end up in your TV... read on to page 2 for the conclusion...