Got my Terabyte!

Dave Siciliano

Dave Siciliano

Final Approach
Joined
Feb 27, 2005
Messages
6,434
Location
Dallas, Texas
Display Name
Dave Siciliano
Home Airfield
Addison, ADS
Someone tipped me off to the fact Fry's was having a sale on Seagate HDs. One Terabyte external was $99.99. They had 1.5 TB for not much more.
Now, you're listenin to a fella that used 5 1/4 inch floppies and whose first HD on a computer was 10MB! So, this is really neat stuff :drink:

Space: the final frontier. Now, I can start working on filling it up!

Best,

Dave
 
Hope you got two! You'll want to back it up regularly. Just ask Leslie!
 
I paid right around $100 each for 2 1.5 TB external drives from Costco recently. Multiple system backups are a really good thing....
 
I picked up a 1.5Tb external drive a few weeks ago since my other two drives were full. The 1.5Tb swallowed those like they were nothing. It didn't even scratch the surface.

And to think I use to think hard drives were unreasonably huge and a waste of money. I used 1.44mb floppies as convinent portable hard drives. They were frigging HUGE and plenty fast. Seriously, my first PC didn't have a hard drive because it wasn't needed. Even my Apple IIe 5.25" 140Kb per side floppies had insane amounts of room on them.

Now every time my camera goes click, it chomps off another 10Mb of drive space. That dinky little 4Gb CF card has more data storage than the entire room full of washing machines for the mainframe at the university I went to...and I have three of those cards.
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Someone tipped me off to the fact Fry's was having a sale on Seagate HDs. One Terabyte external was $99.99. They had 1.5 TB for not much more.
Now, you're listenin to a fella that used 5 1/4 inch floppies and whose first HD on a computer was 10MB! So, this is really neat stuff :drink:
Click to expand...
Ah, you had it easy, young'un. My first hard drive was a used 5 megger out of an IBM XT...

But more to your message, I too recently (November) purchased a 1T external drive. Mine is an Iomega. My first project was to convert several home videos to DVDs and I needed the storage for the interim files. They filled up 100g. Yawn:sleep:, plenty of room left!!!

-Skip
 
Skip Miller said:
Ah, you had it easy, young'un. My first hard drive was a used 5 megger out of an IBM XT...

-Skip
Click to expand...

I worked for Tandy Computers right out of high school. My job was to install the HUGE 5 meg hard drive add-on for the TRS-80 into it's metal housing and solder all the switches to it. I remember going through solder school to learn how to do this and hearing the instructor gripe because we were going to waste our time installing these monster hard drives in a product that would never sell. He was convinced that the drive was much too big for any reasonable person to want. :rofl:

If I remember right, the price was a little steep for the thing, thats for sure! Much more than that terabyte drive.
 
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Skip Miller said:
Ah, you had it easy, young'un. My first hard drive was a used 5 megger out of an IBM XT...
Click to expand...

I think you and I are about the same age Skip.

This is scary however in college it was around 2am that me and another student was leaving for the night just before finals. We turned the corner that went down the long hall past the mainframe windows and stopped cold. A big guy was sitting in the floor against the wall crying while trying to sort out his final project that was due the next day. It was ALL over the place. He had just finished up, started to leave, got halfway down the hall and tripped.
He wasn't using floppy disks because that wasn't an available option.
Each page wasn't 8-1/2 x 11 with writing on it either.
Each page was a punch card with holes in them. LOTS of holes. And there were more cards than you've ever seen in one place in your life...and they weren't numbered.
Anyone ever try to sort out 1000+ punch cards that aren't numbered? I have. It's not funny in the least. Him, me and 5 or 6 others got him to class on time but it was close.

It was 1984 and an Apple was the big shot computer around campus for doing important stuff in the physics research labs. NOT Mac's. They were using Apple II's. The IIe's were rare machines on campus. Remote mainframe terminals were connected via 120ish and 300 baud acoustic modems.

My Apple IIe cost more than my 1.5Tb drive and the laptop I'm going to buy soon. I'd have to add my DSLR camera to the HD and laptop to break about even or possibly beat out the IIe's price tag. IBM XT's with two 5.25" drives and a CGA monitor was running around $6000 at the time.
 
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I have a RAIDed 500G drive for my home machine that I bought about 3 years ago and have yet to half way fill it. On the other had at work, where I run lots of vmware sessions, I use about 1.5T of drive space.

What I am really waiting for is the solid state drives to come down enough price before I decide to buy again.
 
fgcason said:
Each page was a punch card with holes on them. LOTS of holes. And there were more cards than you've ever seen in one place in your life...and they weren't numbered.
Anyone ever try to sort out 1000+ punch cards that aren't numbered? I have. It's not funny in the least. Him, me and 5 or 6 others got him to class on time but it was close.
Click to expand...
I could have been that guy! I do seem to remember that you could put seq numbers in the cards just in case they got out of order.

Only used cards in school and my first real programming job (1980) we used a 3270 based system called Librarian. You could open up a window and start entering lines of code. We had a room with terminals and only senior guys had a terminal at their desk. So, we mostly wrote our code on coding sheets and then scheduled time in the terminal room to key the program.

Ah, the good ol' days - not!

PS Dave, I feel your joy - Congrats, now go buy a few more for backups! :-)

Allan
 
alindsay said:
I could have been that guy! I do seem to remember that you could put seq numbers in the cards just in case they got out of order.
Click to expand...

I forget the details now (that information in my head along with all of high school has been completely overwritten with mechanical skills) however the first 7 character spaces in a line of Fortran were for reserved stuff including card numbering. Those holes were in the cards and you get to sort by that if you hadn't taken a pencil to the cards before dropping them.

Only used cards in school and my first real programming job (1980) we used a 3270 based system called Librarian. You could open up a window and start entering lines of code. We had a room with terminals and only senior guys had a terminal at their desk. So, we mostly wrote our code on coding sheets and then scheduled time in the terminal room to key the program.
Click to expand...

We were apparently one of the very few colleges that didn't require you to schedule terminal time or have limited time schedules. It was come and go as you please 24/7 however there were only two terminal rooms on campus with about 50 terminals plus a few other limited access machines around campus so it was best to get the work done early. There was also a teletype and a card punch machine. There was no touchy feely make wannabe idiots look like programmers sissy languages in the degree program. If you wanted a degree in computers, you had to take both Assembly classes and digital logic then the high level languages like pascal, fortran PL/I and cobol.

I get a laugh out of so called programmers nowadays that claim to have total control of the entire computer and understand everything about them...yet they have no idea what an AND gate is or what makes up a memory location. We built one off computers from off the shelf components then deliberately wrote bits to specific memory locations on specific IC chips to do what we needed. When I said I wrote a 0 or 1 to 8255#2 port C6, that's pin on the IC is precisely where you will find the output bit. There's no software making assumptions at the machine level. Machine language gives total control of everything. It was a pain to write in however it's very fast. I often wonder how fast these 2+Ghz computers with gig's of RAM would really be if the software was written in assembly instead of memory and processor hogging bloatware that's probably poorly written.
 
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fgcason said:
I forget the details now (that information in my head along with all of high school has been completely overwritten with mechanical skills) however the first 7 character spaces in a line of Fortran were for reserved stuff including card numbering. Those holes were in the cards and you get to sort by that if you hadn't taken a pencil to the cards before dropping them.
Click to expand...

FORTRAN column usage - Columns 1 through 5 (IIRC) were used for line numbers, if used at all. Column 6 (or was it 7?) was used to number continuation cards for lines of code that were too long to fit on one card. Column 72 was the last one used. Columns 73 through 80 were available for numbering to minimize the problem noted above. Punch cards, I don't miss them at all. And I started with them in 1969 when I was in high school.
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Someone tipped me off to the fact Fry's was having a sale on Seagate HDs. One Terabyte external was $99.99. They had 1.5 TB for not much more.
Now, you're listenin to a fella that used 5 1/4 inch floppies and whose first HD on a computer was 10MB! So, this is really neat stuff :drink:

Space: the final frontier. Now, I can start working on filling it up!

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

Remember the good ol days when the $1 per MEGABYTE barrier was broken? Dialup BBS's..

Then of course way back in the day, the computer room at my jr hi had two apple IIe computers, with dual floppys, DSDD, and a ONE MEGABYTE external hard drive....

<sigh>:yesnod:
 
3639.jpg


ausrere said:
I worked for Tandy Computers right out of high school. My job was to install the HUGE 5 meg hard drive add-on for the TRS-80 into it's metal housing and solder all the switches to it. I remember going through solder school to learn how to do this and hearing the instructor gripe because we were going to waste our time installing these monster hard drives in a product that would never sell. He was convinced that the drive was much too big for any reasonable person to want. :rofl:

If I remember right, the price was a little steep for the thing, thats for sure! Much more than that terabyte drive.
Click to expand...
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Space: the final frontier. Now, I can start working on filling it up!
Click to expand...

Get into video - that'll fix ya'! My 1TB is 70% full of home movie projects. Add in some photos and music and pretty soon you start bumping the top. I just pulled the trigger on a Hitachi 2TB ($170 at NewEgg).

I wonder how many cassettes that would be?

trs80pic.jpg
 
Punch cards... late 60's thru the 70's there was always someone at the local Christmas bazaar that had a punch card wreath.
The Jr college that I was a student at was also my first DP job. We ran FORTRAN, COBOL, and Assembler compiles for the student class at the school and local high schools. One night, I unwrapped 2 boxes of cards and loaded up the reader (2540 reader punch). After all the jobs were run through, while wrapping bands on them, I dumped a whole box on the floor, scattering them across the floor, under machines, and under the floor. Most didn't have sequence numbers and if they got in the right deck, it was shear luck based on the marks on the cards.
First harddrive I worked with was a 5 meg in a DEC Rainbow. The upgrade was a second 5 Meg ripped out of another Rainbow.
First desktop at work was a dual 5 1/4 " floopy, back when the whole OS would fit on a 360K diskette. Same company had a DEC PDP 11 with an 8" floppy. The hardware company I worked for along the way gave me a laptop with dual 3 1/2" floppy.
Latest addition to my computer farm is a Lenova with two 500 Gig harddrives, and this is 2 years old now.
My TiVo has more disk space than the first mainframe computer system. Probably beats the cpu speed too.
 
HOLY COW!!! A terabyte?? For $100????!!!!!! That's incredible!

(Note: in maybe 5 years that comment will seem hopelessly outdated)

Time for me to buy a backup drive.
 
flyersfan31 said:
HOLY COW!!! A terabyte?? For $100????!!!!!! That's incredible!

(Note: in maybe 5 years that comment will seem hopelessly outdated)

Time for me to buy a backup drive.
Click to expand...

I got my 1.5TB external (Western Digital) from Newegg a couple months ago for 90$ shipped. Very very happy with it, but wish I'd bought two!
 
Steve said:
3639.jpg
Click to expand...

That model was much later.. the model I worked on was the TRS-80 III. Found the list price for the external hard drive here. Looks like just the 5 meg drive unit was $2495.00. $1995.00 for an additional "self install" disk. There was room in the housing for two drives, but just barely. And the housing was huge!

At $2495 a pop, no wonder the engineers watched my every move when I installed the first production model on our line. We built 10 units and then had to sit around and wait for burn-in and testing to finish before we could start regular production. Burn-in was a week, testing lasted 24 hours. Our supervisor didn't want us to help other departments during the down time for fear he wouldn't get us back after all that "specialized" training :rolleyes:, so we sat around for a week playing cards. :yesnod: I only worked there for about 8 months and then it was off to the academy, but I shudder to think how many of those things I built during that 8 months.
 
Tandy. Ick. Remember when you were thinking about buying software and had to check the side of the box for PC compatability. If it said Tandy only, you did not buy it since it wouldn't run reliably or at all on a PC. Tandy was junk.

flyersfan31 said:
HOLY COW!!! A terabyte?? For $100????!!!!!! That's incredible!
(Note: in maybe 5 years that comment will seem hopelessly outdated)
Click to expand...

You want outdated? In college we had one of those too many hours working on electronics days having pizza in the local eatery. We talked about what the future would bring by 2020 or thereabouts. (I know we wrote it down and put it somewhere and it may even be on my Apple disks or somewhere and I keep an eye out for it when I dig through old stuff. I'd really like to find it) It was something like faster than you can believe 300mhz processors, parallel processing, hundreds of Mb hard drives and maybe even an unreasonably gigantic monster Gb HD for thousands of $$$$, picture quality graphics better than EGA, fast communications, bitnet for the masses, being able to carry it around easier than hauling a desktop on a luggage carrier, digital cameras with 3.5" disk drives to store pictures on, star trek communicator type things without landlines, blah blah blah. We were talking some seriously nonsense capabilities that we KNEW wasn't even remotely possible. Someone overheard us and said that's total nonsense. We said we know but we're tired and are just blithering. We all just laughed.
I think my cellphone can do all that now...if I turn off half the features...and it's seriously obsolete. It's like a couple cavemen sitting at the campfire talking about going to the moon in 10 years. Total fantasy stuff...then ending up with a colony on Mars in 5 years.
 
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The guys who used to tell us to "draw a diagonal line across the top of your card deck, so you can put it back together in the right order after you drop it" never dropped one and tried to put it back together again. It only gets you close ... but close doesn't count on a punchcard deck ...
 
Joe B said:
Get into video - that'll fix ya'! My 1TB is 70% full of home movie projects. Add in some photos and music and pretty soon you start bumping the top. I just pulled the trigger on a Hitachi 2TB ($170 at NewEgg).

I wonder how many cassettes that would be?

trs80pic.jpg
Click to expand...

Ah, thanks for the memories. That box, and competitors at the time, are a key reason I have the job I have today (and have had for over 25 years). That thing was a broad band radio transmitter. I had one in my house one weekend when I worked for the Navy and you could not watch television or listen to any radio service for which I had a receiver when it was on. "On the air, everywhere!"
 
Ghery said:
FORTRAN column usage - Columns 1 through 5 (IIRC) were used for line numbers, if used at all. Column 6 (or was it 7?) was used to number continuation cards for lines of code that were too long to fit on one card. Column 72 was the last one used. Columns 73 through 80 were available for numbering to minimize the problem noted above. Punch cards, I don't miss them at all. And I started with them in 1969 when I was in high school.
Click to expand...

IIRC Column 7 was used to denote comments. I think it was a "C" you put in that column to enter non-executable stuff like text.


Trapper John
 
One fella in P-chem was the class a-hole, arrogant, nasty... He also thought he was a genius, but wasn't really...
Anyway, final exam coming up and we were using Schrodinger's equation to predict the probability of a valence electron being in a particular energy band... After writing the equations we had to keypunch a card stack for the reader to input our code into the main frame for a run... I had my stack of punch cards in a shoe box and we were sitting in the cafeteria waiting for our turns to use the mainframe... The a-hole comes up and drops his shoebox on the table... While he is engaged in a bragging match with a couple of the guys, he turns his back (major mistake)... Quicker than Jack Flash, Morrie who was the smallest, quietest guy in class, flips a used card he used as a page marker in the textbook and "zippo" sticks it into the a-holes card stack... Watching his face when his program would not run; priceless...

I was sure glad to get out of that class with a B... The dean insisted that all premed's had to take it - and it was WAAAAY over my head...

denny-o
 
LOL I am one of them youngsters that somehow got suckered over to the dark blue side (Worked as a cobol programmer as my first job out of college in '98). For the first year I kept wondering why all the old timers would refer to the first line of JCL as the Job Card. then it dawned on me that the Jobs used to be on punch cards...
 
ausrere said:
I worked for Tandy Computers right out of high school. My job was to install the HUGE 5 meg hard drive add-on for the TRS-80 into it's metal housing and solder all the switches to it. I remember going through solder school to learn how to do this and hearing the instructor gripe because we were going to waste our time installing these monster hard drives in a product that would never sell. He was convinced that the drive was much too big for any reasonable person to want. :rofl:

If I remember right, the price was a little steep for the thing, thats for sure! Much more than that terabyte drive.
Click to expand...

At one of my earlier jobs we had one "programmer" who wrote the software for our products. His computer was Z-80 based and he had a 10 Mb "Winchester" 14 inch hard drive and ran CPM-80 for an operating system. CPM had an entirely flat file system (no folders or directories) and used an 8.3 character filename format. Due to the lack of any structure along with is total lack of any attempt at organization or revision control his 10 MB drive started to fill up with older and/or nonfunctional versions of his programs (he was afraid to delete any files since he didn't know what was good vs what wasn't) and when a 20 MB 10 inch drive came on the market he insisted that would solve his drive space problem. I predicted that it would take him less than 6 months to exceed the capacity of the larger drive but I was wrong, it only took 4 months because with all that extra space he was even more careless about creating useless files.
 
gismo said:
At one of my earlier jobs we had one "programmer" who wrote the software for our products. His computer was Z-80 based and he had a 10 Mb "Winchester" 14 inch hard drive and ran CPM-80 for an operating system. CPM had an entirely flat file system (no folders or directories) and used an 8.3 character filename format. Due to the lack of any structure along with is total lack of any attempt at organization or revision control his 10 MB drive started to fill up with older and/or nonfunctional versions of his programs (he was afraid to delete any files since he didn't know what was good vs what wasn't) and when a 20 MB 10 inch drive came on the market he insisted that would solve his drive space problem. I predicted that it would take him less than 6 months to exceed the capacity of the larger drive but I was wrong, it only took 4 months because with all that extra space he was even more careless about creating useless files.
Click to expand...

Sounds like Windows!
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Someone tipped me off to the fact Fry's was having a sale on Seagate HDs. One Terabyte external was $99.99. They had 1.5 TB for not much more.
Click to expand...

Did you buy one, or two? :-)

The unrecoverable bit error rate on consumer drives is about 1 in 10^14 to 10^15 bits. A 1TB hard drive has about 10^13 bits. This means that, if your drive is up to spec (how lucky do you feel?), you can expect to get a non-recoverable data loss error about 1 in 10 times if you read its entire contents.

Because of this, if you actually plan on using the whole TB and keeping your data intact, RAID (or some other continuous backup scheme) really starts to make sense for drives that large.

Chris (whose job includes writing programs to process PB-sized data sets)
 
microsd.png


The mouse over says
That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy disks and a soda can full of these cards could hold the entire iTunes stores music library. Hmmmmm.
Click to expand...
 
Joe B said:
Get into video - that'll fix ya'! My 1TB is 70% full of home movie projects. Add in some photos and music and pretty soon you start bumping the top. I just pulled the trigger on a Hitachi 2TB ($170 at NewEgg).

I wonder how many cassettes that would be?

trs80pic.jpg
Click to expand...

Joe: As Lord Boxington said in My Fair Lady: Done her in. Done her in did you say!

Vid is what's done me in! That and an external drive that's starting to exhibit bad sectors!

Couldn't resist the terabyte! Just never thought I'd have my own; and geesh, $100.

Best,

Dave
 
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colohan said:
Did you buy one, or two? :-)

The unrecoverable bit error rate on consumer drives is about 1 in 10^14 to 10^15 bits. A 1TB hard drive has about 10^13 bits. This means that, if your drive is up to spec (how lucky do you feel?), you can expect to get a non-recoverable data loss error about 1 in 10 times if you read its entire contents.

Because of this, if you actually plan on using the whole TB and keeping your data intact, RAID (or some other continuous backup scheme) really starts to make sense for drives that large.

Chris (whose job includes writing programs to process PB-sized data sets)
Click to expand...

Chris: I'm not near filling it up, but who knows. that day may surely come.

Best,

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Chris: I'm not near filling it up, but who knows. that day may surely come.
Click to expand...

Do what I did: buy a HDTV tuner card, run BeyondTV, and all your spare drive space will fill up with TV shows in under a week. At 8GB/hour the space goes really fast. :-)

Chris
 
colohan said:
Do what I did: buy a HDTV tuner card, run BeyondTV, and all your spare drive space will fill up with TV shows in under a week. At 8GB/hour the space goes really fast. :-)

Chris
Click to expand...
BeyondTV? No MythTV? What kind of geek are you?
 
colohan said:
Did you buy one, or two? :-)

The unrecoverable bit error rate on consumer drives is about 1 in 10^14 to 10^15 bits. A 1TB hard drive has about 10^13 bits. This means that, if your drive is up to spec (how lucky do you feel?), you can expect to get a non-recoverable data loss error about 1 in 10 times if you read its entire contents.

Because of this, if you actually plan on using the whole TB and keeping your data intact, RAID (or some other continuous backup scheme) really starts to make sense for drives that large.

Chris (whose job includes writing programs to process PB-sized data sets)
Click to expand...

Chris, it's a generally accepted practice to implement improved error rates along with capacity, either by better magnetics or by using redundant (error correcting) data. I can't say for certain but I suspect that the 1 in 10^4 error rate is an average over the range of magnetic disk recording designs in use at the time this statistic was compiled and it's probably higher than what you'd expect from 1+ TB drives once they're beyond the infant mortality potential. Another factor is, assuming the error rate you quoted includes electronic and mechanical failures vs magnetic media failures) the non-media failures are not directly proportional to the capacity of the media.
 
Now that I have the new external HD; I'd like to dispose of the old one that has some bad sectors. Should I just erase the old HD before tossing it? Re-format. What to protect the old files from being used? I guess I could just copy old Gilligan's Island episodes on there (over write old files) but could never toss Mary Ann <g>

Best,

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Now that I have the new external HD; I'd like to dispose of the old one that has some bad sectors. Should I just erase the old HD before tossing it? Re-format. What to protect the old files from being used? I guess I could just copy old Gilligan's Island episodes on there (over write old files) but could never toss Mary Ann <g>

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

Wipe it, Dave... which does more than reformat it, it writes patterns of gobbledy-gook over it to make it "unrecoverable". I put that in quotes, because you know the NSA (or Jesse) can still get to it.

A number of utilities out there, here's one free one for Windows:

http://www.diskwipe.org

Just be DANG SURE you're selecting the correct drive when you start this. There's no undo.

One way to be "sure" is to put a file called "ERASE THIS DISK.TXT" on the root of the drive you want to delete. When you browse the disks to delete / wipe them, make sure the drive you select has that file on it.
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Now that I have the new external HD; I'd like to dispose of the old one that has some bad sectors. Should I just erase the old HD before tossing it? Re-format. What to protect the old files from being used? I guess I could just copy old Gilligan's Island episodes on there (over write old files) but could never toss Mary Ann
Click to expand...

You need to keep up with the kids don't do nowadays thread.

Didn't you know that when faced with an old broken contraption such as this that's destined for the garbage can that you are obliged, no, not obliged, you are required to take it apart and explore it's innards so you'll know what it's made of and how it works. If done properly, I'm absolutely certain that even the best ultra secret can crack anything organizations won't have a clue where to start on decrypting the mess you made even if you leave all the data intact. It's all in technique.

Besides, the platters can be used to make fun shiny reflecty windchimes.
 
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