500GB removable media modules

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
04/11/2020 at 21:30 • Filed to: None

Some hold more, some less, but most are 500GB.

Years ago, when I was a network admin, I was responsible for a robotic optical storage unit the size of a big refrigerator. It had 6 optical drives and a bunch of cartridges, with a mechanism to pull drives from storage and put them into the drives as well as flipping them over to use the other side. All that technology and it has the same capacity as one of these obsolete hard drives. Or half the capacity of one of these:

Something smaller than your thumbnail has twice the capacity of that beast I used to manage. All of this change in less than 20 years. Simply amazing.

DISCUSSION (18)

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/11/2020 at 21:48

I wouldn’t say a 500GB SATA hard drive is obsolete....the IDE ones yeah, but 500GB is honestly more than most people still even need these days (at least from my experience doing computer tutoring and repair on the side) unless they are doing gaming or a lot of video editing or something...but for most everyday users surfing the web, watching Netflix/Youtube, etc...500GB is more than enough...at least to me!

facw > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/11/2020 at 21:50

Kinja'd!!!

And of course, if you update this, it’s truly impressive:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

And of course, since we have xkcd and the above quote, we may as well link to this as well: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
04/11/2020 at 21:53

But when you can get a 500GB SSD for $50, that use is pretty limited. Massive performance increase for not much money. Sure there are a few things that don’t benefit from faster storage, but not many.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/11/2020 at 21:59

What I've done several times, is take a priority mail large flat rate box, line it with sturdy cardboard that is hot glued in place, then pack it full of old hard drives and mail it to my cousin's house because they make great things to shoot at. I could ship 30 lb of hard drives for their priority mail flat rate.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > facw
04/11/2020 at 22:00

I D ark strike’ s comment. And I certainly hear what you were saying. Have you looked at eBay You might get $5 a piece for those. But then you'd have to mail them...

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
04/11/2020 at 22:01

The first hard drive I ever bought was an IDE 240 MB drive and it cost me $300. That would be 25 years ago.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > facw
04/11/2020 at 22:06

That strip really hit home. I did some vacuuming the other day, and when I went to dump the contents (I usually run a magnet over the garbage to get any hardware that fell off the desk) I found one of my 128 GB cards. Oops.

Y ears ago my first digital camera used SmartMedia cards, and those had a maximum capacity of 128 MB. I went to lie down on the bed and put my elbow on one and cracked it. Damn, that was disappointing, especially as those cards were getting hard to find at a reasonable price. They had been discontinued, and went from around $19 to $75 or more. Nearly 20 years later I still have that camera, although I haven’t fired it up in ages; after spending so much money on it it is hard to part with it, even if a $3 camera found at the Goodwill Outlet or even my phone can take better pictures.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/11/2020 at 22:13

That sounds like fun. We usually used old cans of paint or (seemingly) empty propane tanks. So much more fun to go shooting in the middle of the desert instead of at a range.

Kinja'd!!!

Years ago when moving, I had a bunch of full-height 5.25" 5 and 10 MB hard drives to toss out - big ‘ol heavy beasts. Rather than carry them down the rear stairs we decided to have a hard drive shotput contest off of my balcony, then we could pick them up from the lawn and continue . I got the furthest distance, but my aim was off and I hit a tree, removing a limb from it in the process. Try doing that kind of damage with a microSD card...

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
04/11/2020 at 22:14

Oh, I’m not saying it’s worth it to sell them on Ebay...it really wouldn’t be, but I still have a few 500GB mechanical drives laying around I use for repairing computers when their hard drives die.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
04/11/2020 at 22:16

That’s true. Many people I know are getting by just fine with 500GB or less, but I’m not most people. Video and audio production seems to take up ridiculous amounts of space. And when it comes to audio, sometimes I wonder if the quality is really that much better than the stuff I was doing in ProTools on a beige G3 back in ‘97-’98 (and yes, I still have that computer)

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw
04/11/2020 at 22:23

True, but not everybody I work for has the money to go out and buy a new SSD. Also, that’s $50 USD to you, which is like $70 CAD for me, so more expensive here...and prices for a 256GB or 500GB SSD of decent quality up here tend to be more around the $85-90 CAD mark online if you want a drive from a decent company like Samsung, Western Digital, PNY, AData, etc and not just some cheap Chinese brand .

I have a lot of folks on lower incomes or who are retired that I keep older SATA drive spares around for in case their hard drives fail in their machines. I think a lot of us are spoiled by how fast SSDs are these days, but mechanical drives aren’t THAT slow. Sure, boot times are a lot quicker with SSDs (often ridiculously so), but once booted up, mechanical drives aren’t that bad to use for everyday stuff at all. Heck, the laptop I am typing this from still ‘ only’ has a 500GB SATA HDD in it and it’s fine for what I use it for. (For reference, my high-end desktop PC for gaming and video editing, etc has a SSD OS drive and HDD Data drive, so I know what the speed difference is like daily). :)

I know those 500GB mechanical drives aren’t really worth much these days...I just know they can be more usable then what a lot of people think, at least from my experience. :)

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/11/2020 at 22:31

My brother is still using the original keyboard that came with our 1996 IBM Aptiva back in the day on his current Core i7 Win10 desktop PC and I’m using a Compaq RT101 keyboard from 1993 daily on my Win10 desktop. We both keep using them because the feel of them to type on is so much more pleasant than modern stuff....at least to us, haha (well, more pleasant other than super expensive modern mechanical keyboards) !

That’s probably the oldest ‘hardware’ we still have in active use!

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
04/11/2020 at 22:50

Funny you mention that, because I still have a couple of classic IBM Model M keyboards around. One of them I modified to replace the escape key with a red one that says ‘PANIC’; it was supposed to be a stick-on dummy key, but I hollowed it out and made it work with the ol’ IBM. Despite the better feel I don’t currently use it on a regular basis, opting for a fairly simple Dell multimedia keyboard. These days I need ready access to a volume control and I like the smaller size, so I use this fairly basic unit instead of one of the dozens of fancier keyboards I own...

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
04/11/2020 at 23:22

I’m pretty sure that my oldest computer hardware in regular use (aside from things like power cables) is a quad-port USB 2 bracket that came with a motherboard I got over 16 years ago. My keyboard is almost 15 years old I think, but I’d happily replace it if I could find a replacement I was happy with.

SmugAardvark > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/12/2020 at 01:48

I was just talking with my girl the other day about when I was still a kid (somewhere around middle-school aged) , and how thrilled I was when my parents got a 50MB hard drive for our computer at home. In fact, it was what started my interest in computers in earnest, because my folks couldn’t fathom why you should have to open the case to put the hard drive in. “ Something, something, you should be able to just set it on top and it should work” is what one of them reckoned.

I distinctly remember thinking, “50 whole MB? We’ll never fill that thing up!”

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/12/2020 at 07:57

I use a Samsung soundbar for speakers on my desktop and also have a headset hooked up to it, so the volume control is within easy reach on the headset cable or on the remote for the soundbar I just leave sitting next to the keyboard :)

CaptDale - is secretly British > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
04/12/2020 at 14:24

Those 500 gb sata are far m ore reliable than that 1tb micro sd. Those high storage sds always seem to crap out. Or at least did before. I am sure they will get more reliable, but I still don’t go higher than 64gb which I rarely need all of in my phone anyhow.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > CaptDale - is secretly British
04/12/2020 at 17:25

Agreed. Whatever I put on a microSD card is always backed up somewhere else, or if the card is being used for photography it gets backed up elsewhere after being used. Those hard drives will probably last for some time as they are being used as removable media and don’t run constantly.

I’ve been lucky so far when it comes to flash drives and the like, having not experienced a failure in quite some time. But in my mind I know it's always a possibility...