In 1978, I was the Controller of a publicly traded computer company. We made and sold the first desktop computer with a hard drive. Back in the day, hard drives were called "Winchester" drives.
The 5MB we used drives cost us $5,400 USD each. Today, I bought 2 each "WD My Book Duo 8TB dual-drive" for $660 USD. At the 1978 cost per MB, my two new 8TB drives would cost $17,280,000,000 USD.
That works out to 3.2 million times the capacity for 12% of the cost.
A tandy?
Geezer,
Where did you buy the drives?
Magnifico,
For those of us with very large amounts of stored data and home networks this would be important information.
A PC with a hard drive (of any size) in 1978 was pretty impressive. It must have been physically massive, like 14"...maybe 8". It even predates ST-506. PPC-2000 maybe? I bet the 5MB winchester drive you sold in that computer in 1978 still works.
The 8TB WD you just bought likely has a high failure rate with a typical life span of 2-3 years under normal use. Even the enterprise class drives these days have horrible reliability.
Al, I bought them off of amazon.com. The 6TB and 8TB were the same price. 12TB was $599. Frys.com also had 4TB at a comparable price.
4TB WD drives are for sale on amazon.cn, Try
Anonymous: They were 5,25 inch HDs. The 5MB machines sold for more than $20K. As prices and costs dropped rapidly we were able to maintain the same gross margin.
These machines had a proprietary OS. RAM was 64K. Yes 64K! RAM was 72 8K chips that cost $35 each.
Isn't it AMAZING how much storage is available for a song. Amazing!
Anonymous: I have bought 12 each hard drives 1TB or larger. Five are Seagate and seven are WD. So far, three Seagate drives have failed. No WD drives have failed on me.
I bought these new drives to avoid loosing data.
Life for HDDs is usually, or was, rated @ 10,000 hours, or 5 years @ 40 hours a week.
Backing up to optical discs is risky. Most of mine, high quality/cost blanks became trash in less than 5 years.
SSHDs look promising but the capacity is low making them relatively expensive.
i read that seagate drives have the highest failure rates.
Be very careful with WD external drives. WD has decided to fuse a proprietary USB controller board in place of a standard sata connection. This means the drives cannot be removed and used elsewhere. If the usb internal controller burns out or you snap the connection, you won't be able to access your data by changing enclosures. Also, the drives maybe high quality with long warranties, but it's unknown if the usb board will last just as long.
