I once bought a 500MB SCSI disk for close to 3000DM. Sigh.

Our first computer had 417mb disc.  The salesman convinced us to get the 486 66Mhz (Only the 100mhz was faster at the time) with CD drive, because floppies would be on the way out, though I didn’t believe him when he said soon there would be a way to record CDs at home.

£1000 in (I think) ‘95.

My dad bought his first pc when graphics cards were new to the market, an S3 Virge with about 4Mb of RAM

I have a 230mb hard disk at home with eight-inch platters.  Haul it out sometimes to show people who never heard of an 8-bit processor etc.

I love looking at stuff like this. I found my Dad’s old magazine about the amazingly fast and last computer you’ll ever need from the early 90s…

Never know what you’ll find going through the magazines your dad hides in the closet…

The 80 gig hard drive currently on this computer is starting to look rather dated. 

I read an interview a few years ago with Laurie Spiegal, a musician and computer programmer.  She talked about how she got into programming in the early ‘70s while at Bell Labs.  At one point they got in a new data drive, which as I remember it had the capacity to store an enormous 1 meg of data.  She and the other programmers suspected that no one would ever write a program that would require that entire meg.

I’ve got a 320GB and an 80GB in my desktop PC. I use the 80 for backup purposes when restaging the system. Watching the RSS feed from DealNews.com I’ve seen 750 and 1TB drives going for ridiculously cheap prices these days. In fact this listing for a Maxtor 1TB SATA drive from Frys.com has a price of a mere $170 + $7 shipping.

That’s just ridiculously cheap. Eventually I’m going to break down and buy one of the Linksys NAS devices that’ll hold two SATA drives directly on your network and stuff a couple of 1TB drives in it.

As long as you stay away from WD NAS devices. There was a stink a few months ago about them not sharing audio and video files for reasons of “copyright protection”.

Actually that was their external 1TB hard drives and some follow up articles indicated that the drives wouldn’t share the files over the Internet. Apparently the MyBooks series comes with some software that allows you to access the external HD remotely over the Internet. File sharing over standard network drives on the home network should still work OK.

Still, damned annoying.

I use FreeNAS to setup my own NAS at home. Easy to use and configure!

I’m always torn between appliancing standard PC hardware or using low-power and low-noise dedicated hardware. The latter is usually a more pleasing package, but sooner or later the lack of flexibility is starting to annoy.

I had a 16k memory pack for my ZX81- built by an independent company to Sinclair, it had a little switch that made it 14k with the other 2k used to programme in hex.

Excellent point Elwed and I agree. For me the decision was easy since I had a spare box lying around and my only cost was for one more drive for mirroring. 160 which at the time I got it was $80. So for essentially $80 I had a NAS with RAID 1.

ZFS looks interesting, too. Grab a free copy of Solaris to play with it or give Nexenta a try (either Nexenta Core to roll your own or the free developer version of the NexentaStor product).

So many choices....