The inexorable march of technology
by James on Feb.04, 2010, under Computers
The first hard drive that I ever had was 500 MB. Yes, it was smaller than the storage capacity of a CD-ROM, but that’s OK because they didn’t have those then either.
As the years went by, whenever I went looking for a new hard drive, it was always to get the biggest that I could afford. The size was needed to put all those shiny new games, MP3s, and digital videos that kept getting larger as their quality increased.
Recently and after a protracted illness, my hard drive passed away. After a brief mourning period I found myself tasked with replacing it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a new one as my laptop is already over three years old. Instead, I found myself looking for the highest quality hard drive that I could find at the best price.
I found this interesting because storage is no longer a major issue. All of the hard drives I looked at were over 200 GB in size. Digital storage has no become so cheap that, unless you have specialized needs (i.e. video editing), it is impossible to pull a hard drive off of the shelf and it not be at least adequate. Suddenly it’s not all about storage size but the extra features (like shock protection for when I drop my laptop) and the specs of the discs (cache, RPMs).
From my earliest experiences with computing, storage space was always at a premium and now it has become essentially free.
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