i love technology

[piranha]

right: 1 TB. 1 terabyte. the size of a hardcover. left: 16GB USB flash drive.

i remember roughly what i paid for my very first own 40 MB drive; it was a big chunk of money for a big chunk of hardware, i pondered for quite a while whether should i get 20MB or 40MB. today i paid $350 for the 1TB (and this wasn't the cheapest available; i wanted the rep, the access speed, and the multiple interfaces). here's a reminder of the cost of hard disk storage. that's a fun page to read (for geeks).

and USB flash drives are just too cute. i am surprised none came in pink, *snicker*.

Comments

[hmms-sio.livejournal.com]

hehe

They do: http://image.aving.net/img/2007/07/23/20070723211920420.jpg

pretty in pink and sparkles

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*shudder*. oh my eyes, my eyes! it burns!

those look like they're designed for paris hilton and friends. :)

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Yep, yep. I remember working with some 10 MB drives that were, oh, maybe the size of a big box of file folders, with clear plastic cases so you could see the platters spinning and heads seeking. And now, many-GB camera memory sticks the size of a stick of gum.

even further back

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

pre-personal computing i think the first ones i worked with myself were 80MB CDC disk packs. those buggers were heavy! being an operator back then was a good workout. i wish i had one of those packs now just so i could take a picture of it with my USB flash drive.

i see somebody did it with a CD: http://www.microvax2.org/images/CDC%20882%20Disk%20Pack.jpg -- that's an 882, which IIRC was a whopping 200MB and weighed something like 40 lbs.

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I was browsing for flash drives yesterday (chiefly at Dell, since I have a discount coupon) and agree on their cuteness.

For the younger gigglies there's this one (http://store.lexar.com/?category=23&subcategory=51&productid=JDOK1GB-723).

USB bracelet

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

wow, that's definitely way out of my age range. who is "hannah montana"?

but i really like the bracelet sort of idea -- make your storage devices into wearable art. i never liked the beige and boxy syle.

Re: USB bracelet

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

What you don't want to "Store and carry your secret identity"? :-)

I became vaguely aware of Hanna Montana (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102101512_pf.html) because her show came to town in January and the Washington Post devoted many column inches to the craze.

Re: USB bracelet

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i especially don't want to SHARE my secret identity. :)

tickets to the Hannah Montana show Jan. 7 at Verizon Center, $250 to $300 a pop. That's if they were lucky: One broker priced floor seats at $1,595 each. Elsewhere in the country where the "Best of Both Worlds Tour" is headed, seats were reselling for as much as $3,000

that's ... stunning. _i_ don't pay that sort of money (the former) to see a rock band. i can see why disney loves this giggling demographic -- their parents are made of money and are apparently putty in the hands of their children.

Re: USB bracelet

[post-ecdysis.livejournal.com]

That article doesn't quite make clear that those aren't Disney's prices; her concert series was plagued by e-scalpers who have gamed Ticketmaster's online ordering system. I wish Disney had the common sense to give a free concert in every city where she sold out in five minutes -- if you create that sort of hunger in an audience I think you should feel a moral obligation to feed it, to say nothing of the corporate goodwill that would be generated.

Me, I can't bring myself to dislike Miley Cyrus. She's cute, she writes her own songs, and I just have a sense that Billy Rae raised her better than every other sweet young thing from the past ten years. And I think her show hits a vibe with tween girls who recognize their own duality of being an individual and a product. (I don't recommend that you actually look directly at the show yourself, there are some potentially lethal doses of sitcom tropes in there.)

Re: USB bracelet

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, the article wasn't quite clear, but i did get the impression those weren't disney prices. still, kids/parents apparently pay those incredible price. i agree, a free concert now and then would be the right thing to do, but in my book disney isn't about free anything, ever.

that's not miley cyrus' fault (on whom i have no opinion, not knowing a thing about her). though that duality you mention makes me almost watch the show now, just to see how it goes about that. but i am seriously allergic to sitcoms, and not fond of disney's non-animation products to start with, so i'll probably pass.

[hmms-sio.livejournal.com]

And these:
http://www.dunny.nl/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/bearbrick_usb.jpg

teddy bear USB

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ok, now i need bleach to scour my brain clean again.

[erik]

The thing about flash drives for me is that they're so ubiquitous.
I have five or six, and I've only ever paid for one. I got one with my tax software this year (1GB), one with my tax software last year (512MB), one when I took a class (it had all the manuals for the system we were learning) (64MB), etc.

They seem to have replaced floppies for sneakernetting things. Which is fine. But more people carry them than carried floppies. Not sure what that means; probably just that PCs are more mainstream. Back when a floppy was 5.25", only dweebs knew what they were.

sneakernetting

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh yeah, personal computers are more mainstream. but also, flash drives are handier than floppies -- much more storage, smaller; you can put them on your keyring which you never could with a floppy. waaaay sexier -- and now that i've started looking i see how many design choices there are, so you can "express yourself".

i still have a couple of red transparent floppies; primary colours were about the most you could get. :)

Re: sneakernetting

[erik]

Oh, I have stacks and stacks of (3.5") floppies; one of the phone systems we service uses floppies (and only floppies) for backups and upgrade software loads. Pretty much every system we touch has a floppy (or maybe two) laying inside the case with a backup on it.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

My flash drive is the ordinary steel gray, but I have it on a long loop of pink ribbon, to make it more convenient for the sneakernet. (And to help distinguish it from other flash drives. Floppies were big enough to write meaningful labels on with a pen.)

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

colour-coding it with ribbon is a good idea. i didn't care much about the colour, but then i found out the paramour bought exactly the same one on the same day (zie's off in toronto right now), *heh*, and yeah, they're too bloody small to write anything on them.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

A slightly different pink, with the option of engraving: http://pantone.com/pages/flashdrives/product.aspx.

I have one in the cranberry color, for my amusement.

pantone!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

oh, pantone colours! ok, now i am starting to take to the idea. a lively 3005C, that's beautiful. or the 159C, that looks like it matches the dot on my OLPC XO.

[platonios.livejournal.com]

Pleo, that boggles the mind!
WOW, 1TB=1000GB hard disk space!
Is it external? Because I can't imagine this monster be accessed externally!

Heh, *looks fondly* at usb flash...I'd like one of those.

And an interesting photo, in terms of remembering from where we started:
(http://img233.imageshack.us/my.php?image=harddriveca8.jpg)
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disc drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

eSATA

[(Anonymous)]

eSATA being 'external SATA', with the drive in an enclosure and the SATA cable coming out the back of the computer.

USB for big disk transfers sucks rocks; maybe USB3 won't, but I doubt it.

FireWire is ok if the drivers are perfect. I don't think anyone's drivers were ever perfect, so you got 'on a clear disk you can seek forever', even when it wasn't, at semi-random times for semi-random reasons.

eSATA, though, it might as well be in the case, so far as transfer rates go but you can pick it up and run in case of fire.

I have two; one for photos, one for everything else, both 500 GB so I could in theory back up the 1 TB RAID entirely even if it was full. (At the current size of camera DNG images, full is not hard to imagine.)

This lets me do the tape backups much less frequently. :)

-- Graydon, who likes living in the future by and large

Re: eSATA

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, USB and firewire 400 don't feature the greatest transfer speeds, but firewire 800 is fine, and really, my backups don't have to be that fast. i've not have had massive seek problems with the other external firewire drive i have. and most of our hardware is too old for eSATA, so this will do until we've moved into the 21st century. :)

heck, my camera doesn't even record RAW, i'm fine without storing everything in DNG at this point. i know that'll change once i upgrade the camera -- and i've just got a trial copy of lightroom, with which i am totally in love.

1TB drive

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yeah, it is external, and it's accessible via USB, firewire 400 and 800. i like my backup drives to be external; as graydon says that way one can pick them up and run in case of emergency.

Re: 1TB drive

[platonios.livejournal.com]

Yeah, graydon's answer was really informative!

Looking Over the LaCie site

[crazed-lynn.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that post. I hadn't been to the LaCie site for awhile.

I've been looking for a network storage solution for work. They have a Linux powered network storage solution for cheap. This works for me. I think we will go with the 2TB size for $1,200. I'm really curious about the software they are providing to backup Windows machines. I bet, under the hood, is rsync. It would certainly make sense.

And possibly the the Ethernet 1TB disk like yours for home use.

Re: Looking Over the LaCie site

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

while browsing to educated myself before buying, the one i have been eyeing with soem degree of lust has been apple's 802.11n "time capsule". our network is ancient and we really need to upgrade, and that looked like a a good backup solution at the same time. but i read enough bad reviews that i thought "hm, maybe the tech needs to mature a little more".

lacie has a really good rep in mac circles. used to be they were expensive compared to the competition, but that seems no longer true. the drive i bought is built rock-solid, and it was a cinch to set up -- just plug it in (on a mac; haven't hooked it to anything else yet). and it came formatted for the mac, which made me smile a little bit. i did get a disk with backup software but haven't opened it yet; i run my backups with rsync anyway.

Re: Looking Over the LaCie site

[crazed-lynn.livejournal.com]

Everything I've heard about the Time Capsule is the same that I heard and experienced with Apple's AirPort. It is pretty and pretty underpowered. Stacey had two at her house when I met her and still had no reliable network access. Turns out one didn't transmit at all and the other had a weak signal. Apple will have to prove something to me before I buy another wireless router from them!

That said, the Time Capsule is really cool.