I think I have two I could put on the left side. A "full-height" 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don't remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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what's the one on the right?
It's an M.2 NVMe or sata drive.
WD_Black SN770M. There are 1/2, 1, and 2tb models I have the 1tb version here. https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-1tb-sn770m/p/N82E16820250263
Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.
Meanwhile I'm traveling soon and "packing" microSDs, like... 0.5Tos the size and nearly weight of my fingernail. It's ridiculous!
I considered buying the 2To ones ... but I don't even need them. Even the 0.5To ones it's to carry some video library or Kiwix with Wikipedia and StackOverflow which to be honest I don't even truly need as I can get the content over the Internet anyway.
I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge...
I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it's the root of the name "core dump" etc :D
I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.
It’s a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago
The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).
The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.
And it will continue...
Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50€.
We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)
And they all last until about the same date