BluRay Disks have extended capacity to 100 and 128 GB with 3 or 4 layers and compatible burners.
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Flying-Q
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And what about the 2 1/2" double sided floppy drives used by Amstrad and other budget builders? You had to physically remove the disc and replace it upside down to use the other side. My mother's writing projects are all on those old discs from when she owned an Amstrad PCW640 word processor. Half a lifetime of work is now inaccessable due to the lack of a stand-alone drive to feed them to a PC.
machvelocy
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srhelicity
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[citation][nom]LordConrad[/nom]Why no mention of the MultiMedia Card? The MMC came before the SD Card.Why no mention of the original IBM hard drives, weren't they external stand-alone devices?[/citation]
Probably to control the length of the slideshow. There are several technologies mentioned previously that could be included in a more thorough "history of external data storage" article, but I'm not sure how many users would want to click through a 40-slide article.
It's amazing that 3.5" floppies held on so long. I remember using floppies to store my college documents only 6-8 years ago. I think it was the upgrade to XP that brought better handling of USB flash/thumb drives, and I bought a 64 mb USB flash drive that I could finally use in almost any new computer across campus.
Probably to control the length of the slideshow. There are several technologies mentioned previously that could be included in a more thorough "history of external data storage" article, but I'm not sure how many users would want to click through a 40-slide article.
It's amazing that 3.5" floppies held on so long. I remember using floppies to store my college documents only 6-8 years ago. I think it was the upgrade to XP that brought better handling of USB flash/thumb drives, and I bought a 64 mb USB flash drive that I could finally use in almost any new computer across campus.
devBunny
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:: "Isn't floppy disk still the best and safest way to update your bios? Correct me if I'm wrong please xD."
On certain motherboards, for example, Asus P9X79, you can flash the BIOS from a USB stick without booting into an OS. You may not even need to have anything installed on the motherboard, it just needs power.
http://www.asus.com/websites/global/products/ITjeO1wq0nRUPfej/USB_BIOS_Flashback.jpg
On certain motherboards, for example, Asus P9X79, you can flash the BIOS from a USB stick without booting into an OS. You may not even need to have anything installed on the motherboard, it just needs power.
http://www.asus.com/websites/global/products/ITjeO1wq0nRUPfej/USB_BIOS_Flashback.jpg
CaedenV
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The only 2 I have never used are punch cards (though I have seen them, they were just before my time) and the Super Disc. Our old family computers growing up had 8" and 5.25 drives, and later we got into floppies when they became available.
My own first personal build back in 2000-1 was frustrating because I was determined to not install a floppy drive in it. But after I had the thing together I realized the BIOS did not natively support boot to CD (Thank you ABIT lol). So I had to borrow the floppy drive from the family PC, make a boot floppy that would load the CD drivers in order to boot to the CD drive for the first year. Then I did my first (and last thankfully) BIOS update in order to have native CD booting capabilities.
I never owned a Zip or Jazz drive because I heard so many nightmare stories about data corruption, and the ever present question of "where the hell do you back up that much information?" lol, now we say the same thing about multiple TB projects, but still, it was a huge problem back in the day.
I remember when the flash drives came out, and thinking "finally, something useful!". My first one was a USB 1.1 drive that had 128MB of space, and it was HUGE lol. I recently got a 16GB USB3 drive thinking that would be enough space, but am now finding that I should have sprung for a 64GB version as 16GB really isn't that much space in the grand scheme of things. I think flash drives will be with us for a good long time yet.
I also remember my first external (duel firewire) DVD burner. It was $500 (and that was a steal considering most were still in the $750+ range at the time). I burned the external interface (they call it fire wire for a reason) about a year in, but that drive lasted as an internal drive for about 5 more years. Considering I now can only get the dumb things to last 6mo to a year with consistant use I have to say that they had something going with those old drives.
Lastly, I wonder if Hologram DVD (or whatever they are calling them these days) will ever arrive, or if blue ray will be the last platter style optical media. With flash and other solid state memory technologies progressing so well, it is hard to imagine optical media lasting much longer. Sure, it will still hold a place for media distribution (audio and movies), but I think it's days are quite numbered for mainstream consumption.
My own first personal build back in 2000-1 was frustrating because I was determined to not install a floppy drive in it. But after I had the thing together I realized the BIOS did not natively support boot to CD (Thank you ABIT lol). So I had to borrow the floppy drive from the family PC, make a boot floppy that would load the CD drivers in order to boot to the CD drive for the first year. Then I did my first (and last thankfully) BIOS update in order to have native CD booting capabilities.
I never owned a Zip or Jazz drive because I heard so many nightmare stories about data corruption, and the ever present question of "where the hell do you back up that much information?" lol, now we say the same thing about multiple TB projects, but still, it was a huge problem back in the day.
I remember when the flash drives came out, and thinking "finally, something useful!". My first one was a USB 1.1 drive that had 128MB of space, and it was HUGE lol. I recently got a 16GB USB3 drive thinking that would be enough space, but am now finding that I should have sprung for a 64GB version as 16GB really isn't that much space in the grand scheme of things. I think flash drives will be with us for a good long time yet.
I also remember my first external (duel firewire) DVD burner. It was $500 (and that was a steal considering most were still in the $750+ range at the time). I burned the external interface (they call it fire wire for a reason) about a year in, but that drive lasted as an internal drive for about 5 more years. Considering I now can only get the dumb things to last 6mo to a year with consistant use I have to say that they had something going with those old drives.
Lastly, I wonder if Hologram DVD (or whatever they are calling them these days) will ever arrive, or if blue ray will be the last platter style optical media. With flash and other solid state memory technologies progressing so well, it is hard to imagine optical media lasting much longer. Sure, it will still hold a place for media distribution (audio and movies), but I think it's days are quite numbered for mainstream consumption.
DelroyMonjo
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vakuma5000
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Uhh.... were are laser disks and external hard drives? where are the external SSD's? Where is the M-disk? Where is DV-card? you guys are missing a lot of different types of external storage.
belardo
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I'm finally getting rid of my OLD ZIP-Drive (internal IDE) and disks which I kept around in case a client needed to access old data. So when I found my dozen disks, I copied them onto a HD, erased them and may get $10 for the disks and drive.
Used to boot up my Amiga with a single 880k floppy disk with an actual OS. It would be years before MS comes out with a GUI OS for the masses (Windows 95).
Used to boot up my Amiga with a single 880k floppy disk with an actual OS. It would be years before MS comes out with a GUI OS for the masses (Windows 95).
belardo
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[citation][nom]DelroyMonjo[/nom]I still see current MB's with connectors for floppy drives and IDE HDD's.[/citation]
Intel chipsets have not supported floppy or IDE for a few years. An IDE controller was added to intel boards such as those for Core2. I actually use an IDE optical drive because I ran out of SATA connectors on my OLD P35 (Core2 class) motherboard. I still have a few old drives hanging around and pulled the SATA DVRW drive for now. (I'm about to upgrade to a core i5-35xx)
I'm also recycling about 12 hards drives in the 1.6~120GB size as they are useless for todays needs. Copied everything onto a single 500GB drive
Intel chipsets have not supported floppy or IDE for a few years. An IDE controller was added to intel boards such as those for Core2. I actually use an IDE optical drive because I ran out of SATA connectors on my OLD P35 (Core2 class) motherboard. I still have a few old drives hanging around and pulled the SATA DVRW drive for now. (I'm about to upgrade to a core i5-35xx)
I'm also recycling about 12 hards drives in the 1.6~120GB size as they are useless for todays needs. Copied everything onto a single 500GB drive
belardo
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Looking at these OLD 2GB JAZ and 100MB ZIP drives... how we thought they were cheap (they were back then) at $200 for the drives.... when todays SD-cards/flash keys hold 16GB and costs about $20.
Folks, do an image google search on "1571 floppy drive" or even the 1541. These things are HUGE! These 5.25 floppy drives used to costs $280.
Folks, do an image google search on "1571 floppy drive" or even the 1541. These things are HUGE! These 5.25 floppy drives used to costs $280.
eddieroolz
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I used to use the SmartMedia card for my Fujifilm digital camera. 1.3MP of awesomeness in a bulky body, but it was an amazing piece of technology in 2000.
danhitchcock
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- May 26, 2009
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What about cloud and online storage? I'm starting to see the usb flash drives replaced by google docs and drop box. In fact I think that's the only thing that could actually take on something so simple as the usb drive
gm0n3y
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- Mar 13, 2006
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Reminds me of installing the original Grand Theft Auto via floppy disk (50MB total). It took a long time to switch the 30+ disks. When one of my friends wanted a copy and I didn't want to drag it over to his place I emailed it instead. Emailing 50MB over a 28.8 modem (which usually ran closer to 15kb/s) was sketchy. I had to make sure nobody picked up the phone. And if someone called my house sometimes it will close my connection. On the plus side, my email provider never bothered limiting attachment sizes back then.
[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Anyone notice how you click Read More just once and it sticks now? That's because of your feedback ;-)[/citation]
I still prefer to have all the pics and paragraphs on one page... My time is valuable and even with a high speed connection it takes time to click through all the pages.
I still prefer to have all the pics and paragraphs on one page... My time is valuable and even with a high speed connection it takes time to click through all the pages.
I still use the 100mb zip disks on an MPC2000xl sampler, in audio production samplers people still use 3.5" disks a lot.
What about the Magneto-Optical (MO) discs and drives. I used to have an Olympus 230meg 3.5 inch SCSI MO drive. those were the days!
Other bad ideas through the ages:
Konica had an answer to the PhotoCD that scanned 35mm film onto Sony MiniDisc. (really!) Great, a product nobody wants on a media nobody can access. MiniDisc really should have been the ZipDrive of the mid-90's, but Sony couldn't deliver at the same price point.
Who remembers Syquest drives? 44 hulking MB for around $130 in the early 90's. For those of us working with image files back in the day, it beat carrying around a stack of 3.5" floppies, but you paid for it.
Speaking of image files, before the PhotoCD, (pre 1992) Kodak used to keep a digital copy of their library of images on LaserDisc. Twelve inches of silvery goodness with scads of thumbnail images. Of course, the phone in my pocket has more memory capacity than all of the LaserDiscs put together, and they were painfully slow to author, but 20 years ago, it was the haute technique.
Just think of the smack we will be saying about BluRay and MicroSD in 2032....
Konica had an answer to the PhotoCD that scanned 35mm film onto Sony MiniDisc. (really!) Great, a product nobody wants on a media nobody can access. MiniDisc really should have been the ZipDrive of the mid-90's, but Sony couldn't deliver at the same price point.
Who remembers Syquest drives? 44 hulking MB for around $130 in the early 90's. For those of us working with image files back in the day, it beat carrying around a stack of 3.5" floppies, but you paid for it.
Speaking of image files, before the PhotoCD, (pre 1992) Kodak used to keep a digital copy of their library of images on LaserDisc. Twelve inches of silvery goodness with scads of thumbnail images. Of course, the phone in my pocket has more memory capacity than all of the LaserDiscs put together, and they were painfully slow to author, but 20 years ago, it was the haute technique.
Just think of the smack we will be saying about BluRay and MicroSD in 2032....
mapesdhs
Distinguished
- Jan 22, 2007
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[citation][nom]Flying-Q[/nom]And what about the 2 1/2" double sided floppy drives used by Amstrad and other budget builders? You had to physically remove the disc and replace it upside down to use the other side. My mother's writing projects are all on those old discs from when she owned an Amstrad PCW640 word processor. Half a lifetime of work is now inaccessable due to the lack of a stand-alone drive to feed them to a PC.[/citation]
Note they're 3", not 2.5". I'm still using them for maintaining Amstrad 6128 and Spectrum +3 systems;
bought some recently. I think the Tatung Einstein also used the 3" version (now there's a nice system
for its time, 1MB internal drive included). 3" disks are in demand, eg. a box of 79 sold on eBay here
this week for nearly 120 UKP (approx. $185).
Re your mother's projects, just get hold of a 6128, or even the same model of Amstrad. Bound to be
a way of transferring the data. You might need to replace the drive belt, but thanks to excellent sites
such as www.dataserve-retro.co.uk one can easily buy new belts and disks at good prices (I bought
several full maintenance kits).
Ian.
Note they're 3", not 2.5". I'm still using them for maintaining Amstrad 6128 and Spectrum +3 systems;
bought some recently. I think the Tatung Einstein also used the 3" version (now there's a nice system
for its time, 1MB internal drive included). 3" disks are in demand, eg. a box of 79 sold on eBay here
this week for nearly 120 UKP (approx. $185).
Re your mother's projects, just get hold of a 6128, or even the same model of Amstrad. Bound to be
a way of transferring the data. You might need to replace the drive belt, but thanks to excellent sites
such as www.dataserve-retro.co.uk one can easily buy new belts and disks at good prices (I bought
several full maintenance kits).
Ian.
mapesdhs
Distinguished
- Jan 22, 2007
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[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]... Folks, do an image google search on "1571 floppy drive" or even the 1541. These things are HUGE! These 5.25 floppy drives used to costs $280.[/citation]
I bought a Commodore 1541 recently, still working perfectly after almost 30 years.
Have about
7 of them now, three boxed, and a couple of the Vic equivalents. Funny how ancient 80's tech often
still works fine, yet a modern DVDRW or somesuch can die within days or weeks...
Ian.
I bought a Commodore 1541 recently, still working perfectly after almost 30 years.
Have about7 of them now, three boxed, and a couple of the Vic equivalents. Funny how ancient 80's tech often
still works fine, yet a modern DVDRW or somesuch can die within days or weeks...
Ian.
bucknutty
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I got windows 95 on 55 3.5 inch floppy disks. It was the dumbest thing ever made. I was able to install windows 1 time. About 6 months later I had to reinstall windows and disk 34 was corrupt and I was dead in the water.
55 floppies, they came in a shrink wrapped tube sort of like a janga tower. As soon as I took the wrapper off they went all over. Just thinking about the idiocy of it make me laugh.
55 floppies, they came in a shrink wrapped tube sort of like a janga tower. As soon as I took the wrapper off they went all over. Just thinking about the idiocy of it make me laugh.
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