PDA

View Full Version : Technology HD sizes increase and prices fall again



Harrison
21st February 2007, 00:49
I've just noticed Harddrive prices are falling again. And Seagate now have a 750GB HD selling for around £189. This has led to 500GB HDs dropping to below £100 with a 500GB Seagate for £97, a WD for £92 and Samsung for £98.

This means that for under £200 you can now purchase two 500GB HDs! 1TB of storage for under this price was unheard of last year. Great news for retro gaming collectors! ;)

Submeg
21st February 2007, 02:20
Sweet...I need to look into that

Demon Cleaner
21st February 2007, 07:08
I just saw that yesterday as Oz wanted to buy one. At the moment I don't need more storage, but it's always good to know you can get them for very cheap now.

cicobuff
21st February 2007, 10:02
I have just returned from the States, had to go to a memorial service, but went to Fry's electronics where quite often they have crazy blow out deals and got a 400gb Maxtor SATA 7200RPM drive for £58

J T
21st February 2007, 10:56
Just as my main HDD is approaching full too. Awesome news :cool:

Teho
21st February 2007, 17:02
Oh great. I just bought a new 300GB drive last month for £90-ish.

Oh well, good to hear that prices are dropping though. No excuse to not have plenty of storage space anymore, that's certain. :)

Stephen Coates
22nd February 2007, 22:43
Cool.

Might make a good backup option for my 120GB drive. It's just that I'm not sure if I can be bothered to copy 85GB of data onto DVDs using a 2x DVD recorder. And I'd get extra storage at the same time. Not sure what I'd actually use it for though as I haven't really used much disk space at all over the last year.

Harrison
23rd February 2007, 00:32
Why not buy a newer DVD writer Steve? Under £15 now for a decent one!

Although for backing up the contents of a harddrive I actually do think a second harddrive is the best option, and easier to maintain and update the backup compared to DVD-R. I do this with my MP3 collection with the complete collection mirrors between two drives on different machines.

rayzorblue
23rd February 2007, 16:25
Oh well better add a new HD to the list of upgrades my PC needs then since i only got an 80gig one at the moment with 3gig of space on it lol

Harrison
23rd February 2007, 16:56
I don't think it ever matters what size HD I have in a computer. It only ever seem to have 3GB of free space! :lol:

v85rawdeal
25th February 2007, 04:40
And I still remember when my original amiga's harddrive was somewhere in the region of £300 for 40mb (yes... I DID say megabytes)

Don't times change!!! I must be getting old!

Stephen Coates
25th February 2007, 12:13
I am still yet to fill my A500+'s 50MB HD. It might get close to full over the next few weeks, but even then there'll probably still be a few MB left.

TiredOfLife
25th February 2007, 13:44
You could all try just deleting the crap off your hds.
If your anything like me, you will have duplicates and triplicates off stuff in diff partions.
Also have stuff that you have installed and used once.
Spent hours cleaning mine up this morning.
Still full off crap.

Submeg
25th February 2007, 23:08
Yea, I know thats how it is....must clean out mine too.

Harrison
26th February 2007, 15:14
You could all try just deleting the crap off your hds.
If your anything like me, you will have duplicates and triplicates off stuff in diff partions.
Also have stuff that you have installed and used once.
Spent hours cleaning mine up this morning.
Still full off crap.

Nope, I can definitely say that everything my HDs are filled with is unique and needed. I uninstall applications and games if I'm not using them and those are always installed in their own partition or HD anyway so don't impact on the space on my other drives.

The problem I have with running out of HD space is much the same for DC. The downloading of large complete TOSEC collections!

The last I finished downloading was a Sega Saturn one that took up around 170GB, plus I still have the Euro set to download which is another 34GB, taking the total collection over 200GB. Plus a new TOSEC Saturn set is out which is 94GB, but I'm not sure if that has anything in it that I'm missing from the existing sets I have. As you can see, such collections quickly use up all available HD space!

Harrison
26th February 2007, 15:20
I am still yet to fill my A500+'s 50MB HD. It might get close to full over the next few weeks, but even then there'll probably still be a few MB left.

What do you have on the drive Steve? On my Amigas I wouldn't have been able to cope with just a 50MB drive. Although I did tend to install pretty much all applications and games I could find on the HD at once. But even on a 1.3GB HD I only just managed to fill it up after installing ever HD compatible commercial and PD game I could find, as well as every Application I could get my hands on, and I still had around 100MB free.

Stephen Coates
26th February 2007, 16:01
I think it just has Workbench 2.04, DPaintIII and PenPal, but I'm sure there will be much more on there in the future.

Demon Cleaner
26th February 2007, 16:58
The downloading of large complete TOSEC collections!So tru, so true :cry:

TiredOfLife
27th February 2007, 21:55
There is Amiga games that would take up the whole 50 meg these days.

Demon Cleaner
27th February 2007, 23:24
My whole amiga collection takes 280GB of space.

Submeg
28th February 2007, 12:13
geez....how much HD space have you got?

Demon Cleaner
28th February 2007, 12:25
I have it on an external 300GB disk. And my friend Zyriax has the 1:1 backup of it :lol: so nothing can happen, only if our disks will crash both at the same time.

Submeg
28th February 2007, 21:03
Touch wood....

Harrison
28th February 2007, 22:14
Stranger things have happened!

But that is as safe as any backup method I can think of these days. Well that is until Blu-Ray writers come down in price, then you can back the whole HD up to 6 Blu-Ray discs. :)

J T
28th February 2007, 22:18
Touch wood....

What, are you backing up your pr0n collection at the moment then :rolleyes:

Submeg
1st March 2007, 00:24
Lol too funny....no, just that I want to look into rom sets and will need to get a massive external drive. Can they be coonected by USB?

Demon Cleaner
1st March 2007, 00:33
Can they be coonected by USB?Of course, and firewire.

Submeg
1st March 2007, 00:42
Sweet, what is the biggest you can get? Are there 500 GB externals?

Demon Cleaner
1st March 2007, 01:00
Yep, there are 500, 750 and even 1000GB external disks available now. The 1000GB are only firewire and are still a bit expensive, but f.ex. the WD 500GB one costs "only" 100£.

Harrison
1st March 2007, 01:13
You can even get 2TB (2000GB) external drives.


The 1000GB are only firewire and are still a bit expensive

Actually that isn't true any more. You can get a 1000GB Freecom USB2 external drive, and Lacie do 2000GB triple interface drives that have USB, Firewire and SATA.

And actually there is quite a bargain at the moment. The Lacie 1000GB Big Disk External USB2 HD is now only £209 + VAT, and the Lacie 600GB version is only £132.60 + VAT.

Submeg
1st March 2007, 01:38
Whoa thats cool, but a bit expensive for me at the moment. I will probably get two 500 GB disks.

wilsonsamm
24th July 2007, 01:34
and only thirty years ago people were still weaving core memory by hand. And 16 bits of memory would cost you the modern equivalent of £1.

J T
24th July 2007, 21:59
Punch-cards FTW

Harrison
25th July 2007, 02:12
Punch cards were great, well until you needed to edit the data... :hmmm:

Demon Cleaner
25th July 2007, 06:03
Or the program got a return code and you had to restart with the program. We also had that here at work, long time ago. You had boxes with programs on cards, and feeded them to the machine.

Also annoying was, when you dropped the box, and had to sort out the cards again in the right order :)

v85rawdeal
25th July 2007, 10:02
or worse...

One went missing!!!

Demon Cleaner
25th July 2007, 10:48
or worse...

One went missing!!!Then you simply rewrite the small missing code and print/punch another one ;)

Harrison
25th July 2007, 14:50
You still actually used punch cards until recently? :blink: Sounds like the admin of that system was holding out for one hell of a service pack for the latest OS before taking the plung and upgrading!

Demon Cleaner
25th July 2007, 15:05
You still actually used punch cards until recently?No, of course not. But I still saw the punching machines, as we still have one as showcase in the entry of our administration.

But I'm already working there for almost 12 years now, and the older ones told me how they had to run their jobs.

And of course I also wrote programs in JCL where you have a program that you can call during your own (programs made by IBM), and we had one to print/punch (called IEBPTPCH (http://virtual.clemson.edu/dcit/sig/docs/os390/o460.html)). WE used it to print, which is the same procedure when you use it to punch like in the past.

Harrison
25th July 2007, 15:14
I see. Much like any long running OS, it has it's querky commands due to legacy commands still being used and adapted for modern purposes.

J T
25th July 2007, 16:37
It'd be annoying if you put one through at the wrong time and had to start again.

How many cards did it take, on average, to enter a program?

Demon Cleaner
25th July 2007, 17:10
How many cards did it take, on average, to enter a program?Well, in JCL when you write a line of code, it's called a job card, meaning you had 1 card for 1 line of code (80 characters limit). So imagine a program with 100 lines, you have 100 cards!

Harrison
25th July 2007, 17:16
Pure madness, but at the time punch card computers were new they must have seemed amazing.

J T
25th July 2007, 17:23
What did people do with the data they generated? how did they get the results off and things like that?

Could a punch card based computer do all that much?

I ask becuase I know pretty much sod all about them.

Harrison
25th July 2007, 17:45
From what my mum told me about the mainframe she used in the 60's they would select the punch cards needed to retrieve specific records (she worked in the ordering department of a part of Philips) and the computer would then sort the records and print the results onto that whole punched continuous paper. They would then have to go through the printouts to check the records. She didn't actually code and create the punch cards, just use the premade programs to obtain the records needed.

Demon Cleaner
25th July 2007, 19:23
Read about the IEBPTPCH program so you can get a better notion of what it does, and what "print" means.

IEBPTPCH program (http://virtual.clemson.edu/dcit/sig/docs/os390/o460.html)