I had a three-fold coincidence today.  That is to say, I noticed that the hard drive in my Macbook was almost full, so I was lightly vexed,  I submitted my first timecard at work since getting a raise last week, so I was lightly elated, and Newegg dropped the price of this drive from $90 to $65 with free shipping, so I was uh lightly uh.

I shouldn’t start sentences I can’t finish.

Anyway, like so often happens, it made me boggle at how nice it is to live right now, if you’re a geek anyway.

For reference, my first hard drive:

This is not actually mine, of course; that drive has long since gone to the graveyard.

The Seagate ST225 was the go-to drive for 80s geeks on a budget who desperately wanted a hard drive as opposed to keeping everything on floppy disks.  At $189 or so if you bought it via mail order, it was the first consumer level drive that I remember to actually break the $10 per megabyte barrier, and being a half height drive you could easily fit two of them into a standard XT clone case.  Call it 5.25″ wide x 9″ long x 1.5″ high, though I don’t know the exact dimensions. It spun at 3600rpm and had an average seek time of 65ms – that is, if you asked it for any particular bit of data, on average it took about 0.065 seconds to find it, though it could be as much as twice that depending on where the heads were in relation to the data you wanted.

The only drawback about adding a hard drive to your system is that you generally had to upgrade the power supply from the standard anemic 65W supply to 130W or so, especially if you wanted to mount two of these.

This, on the other hand, is the drive I bought to give me some more breathing room:

This Samsung Spinpoint is 2.5″ wide, about 0.4″ high and let’s call it 3.5″ long.  It has a average seek time in the 11ms range, spins at 7200RPM and holds 640 gigabytes, or nearly 33000 times as much data as the old ST225.  It also cost me just over a dime per gigabyte, and it can run off less than a half-watt of power.

Nostalgia aside, the “good old days” can get stuffed.