this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!

Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.

So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I have some very old RAM at home. You could see the single bits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory I have a small viol with some 100 bytes, and one of those fabrics with the rings still on the wires. I threw away the PCB because it was huge...

I just read the article and learned: it was phased out before I was born, and it's the root of the name "core dump" etc :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?

[–] MDCCCLV 3 points 2 weeks ago

This is for desktop PC. But the correct answer is overall smaller because if you only had spinny drives a lot of small devices wouldn't be possible.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

And somewhere in there is an NVMe as well.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The 1TB and up microSD cards blow my mind.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

And it will continue...

Soon we'll have 100TB "drives" the size of a thumb nail for 50€.

We'll all (we geeks anyways) walk around with the Wikipedia, all Star Trek movies and so on in our pocket :-)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

And they all last until about the same date

[–] ILikeBoobies 1 points 2 weeks ago

It’s a bit misleading, you could have used an sd card long ago

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The new hard drives are almost the size of old SD cards (not the micro ones).

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