New Zealand Vintage Computer Forums

I just ordered 10 terabytes of storage for my home NAS (at ~$25/TB if you were wondering.)
This is probably enough raw disk space for an emergent AI to form and enslave everything.
That is all.

haha good work
I'm not quite at 10, but at 8TB total for storage. I think my actual data usage is probably around 3TB. But that data all gets stored twice.

nope, that's not excessive.

How did you get $25/TB? My data usage across all my PCs and external storage devices would probably be ~10-12TB. I probably wouldn't' notice if 4TB went missing though. Been piling up since '04.

SpidersWeb wrote:haha good work
I'm not quite at 10, but at 8TB total for storage. I think my actual data usage is probably around 3TB. But that data all gets stored twice.

Yeah, that's the idea, I'm going RAID and mirroring everything. I'm going to get ALL my redundant and non-redundant backups & archives from their scattered haphazard collection of external drives, make ONE MASTER file structure that holds everything, mirror it, and breath a big sigh of relief. I probably have close to 5TB of data to my name already, but a lot of it is dupes because I've literally never had a sensible archiving system before.

10TB is such an utterly absurd amount of data, it helps to have some comparisons:
- the first computer I bought with my own money, a lovely 486/25 at age 12, had a 100MB HDD. This is 100 000 times that.
- there are ROUGHLY (probably less than...) 30 000 commercial software titles for the C64. Assuming the average title used both sides of a flippy disk (probably not true - and cassettes held even less!) I could store more than 1000 copies of the entire C64 library.
- if I launched Audacity, set it to save directly to low-bitrate MP3 (128 kb/s), and hit "record", I could capture audio on this setup for twenty years before I ran out of disk space. If I were recording 360p streaming video, it would take 1300 days.

Clym5 wrote:How did you get $25/TB? My data usage across all my PCs and external storage devices would probably be ~10-12TB. I probably wouldn't' notice if 4TB went missing though. Been piling up since '04.

Refurbished enterprise-grade 2TB drives from Newegg via Ebay for $56/ea. Free shipping too.

Link is here if you're curious. The dollar exchange is close enough but I don't think you qualify for the free shipping.

Also wait till you see the free NAS they're going into - check the 'garbage find' thread.

My old Mythbuntu box had just over 11TB of storage until my setup got corrupted and I gave up on it.

I've been using the drives to replace several other drives that have failed on my backup storage since then but my main machine (a 2009 Mac Pro) has around 5.5TB in it now

Back in the 90s I remember being amazed when I heard a 1GB hard drive had been developed. Now we count in terabytes. Incredible!

I was surprised to read, in a November 1987 ComputerWorld newspaper that my Grandpa kept, that Tandem Computers had an optical storage system that could hold 84 gigabytes across 32 disks in one unit with a seek time of 120ms to 17 seconds. $300,000 NZD in '87... Damn!

Also, the people selling those 2TB drives don't ship to NZ at all. Oh well.

Clym5 wrote:I was surprised to read, in a November 1987 ComputerWorld newspaper that my Grandpa kept, that Tandem Computers had an optical storage system that could hold 84 gigabytes across 32 disks in one unit with a seek time of 120ms to 17 seconds. $300,000 NZD in '87... Damn!

Even more extreme, in 1988 Olivetti's FileNet OSAR-200 apparently took 20 discs for 530GB storage, and you could have eight units on one system. I think you'd need to dedicate a "floor" to it rather than a room though and I'm going to guess you'd be spending many many millions of dollars. I have two of the workstations in the garage, and four of the high resolution terminals, but can't do anything with them as they boot off ethernet

I remember the day my 286 had a BIG 10 meg MFM drive, it was great for my BBS (Spitfire) Swivel's BBS. And then the IOmega 100 meg Zip disks came from the gods.

Swivel wrote:I remember the day my 286 had a BIG 10 meg MFM drive, it was great for my BBS (Spitfire) Swivel's BBS. And then the IOmega 100 meg Zip disks came from the gods.

... and the click-of-death came from Satan...

Gibsaw wrote:

Swivel wrote:I remember the day my 286 had a BIG 10 meg MFM drive, it was great for my BBS (Spitfire) Swivel's BBS. And then the IOmega 100 meg Zip disks came from the gods.

... and the click-of-death came from Satan...

No. Upgraded the drive, then pulled it apart to see how it worked.

The click of death came from Maxtor didn't it LOL