Like Glenn Reynolds, I got one of these little beauties for Christmas. It's a 50 GB USB (2.0) cable-powered HD, about the size of a DVD case cut in half. Worked right out of the box. Backed up everything with plenty of room to spare.

When I worked at Linguatech a decade ago, creating content for CALI (computer-assisted language learning) software, we had a 1 GB drive for mastering CDs. It originally cost $1000 ($1.00/MB) and broke down about every 6 months. In an article I wrote in 2001, I calculated the cost/MB at $.01. Now it's less than $.002. In ten years, the cost/MB has come down a factor of over 500. Amazing.

An Instapundit reader also describes the disk drive units that came with IBM 360/370 mainframes, a stack of platters each more than a foot in diameter. I can still remember seeing one on a high school field trip (yes, I'm that old). A tech pulled the drive unit out of a machine to show us where the data was stored. It looked like a stack of rust-colored LPs. (Wait, does anybody know what an LP looks like, anymore?)

Labels: mainframe, technology