Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Hardware Woes and Evolution

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 3, 2011

My secondary hard drive has been showing symptoms of failure for the last several days – freezing up for several seconds while reading or writing data. It hasn’t returned any corrupted data on a read yet, though one game did end up with a corrupted save after it took three whole minutes to complete the operation. Ugh. It’s made things a little tricky on my end – I’d hoped to get a couple of things done this week that have not happened as a result. I apologize. Fortunately, the replacement drive arrived and with luck I should be back to full operational capacity tonight.

I don’t know if it’s amusing or just sad how much my life and behavior revolve around my computer. But as that’s my profession, hobby, and primary source of entertainment, it’s to be expected. But when the system is malfunctioning, while there are alternatives, it really causes problems.

But on the flip side – the new hard drive is 2 terabytes. Which is kinda middle-of-the-road ho-hum storage today, with a pricetag well under $200. I remember back in 1988 or thereabouts  when my mother (a sales rep for DEC at the time, IIRC) was working on a contract for I think it was the USGS for a data storage solution that involved something like 3 tB. It was a multi-million-dollar contract for what basically amounted to a system of hard drives. I was boggled by the concept of a terabyte of storage — the hard drives of that time period were something on the order of 10 megs on the average, and not yet standard equipment for a PC.

I guess in ten years we’ll be casually sticking multi-petabyte hard drives in our machines. But will games then be taking up multiple tBs of hard drive space?

 


Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



  • Bad Sector said,

    I remember when i was at school and mentioned “terabytes”, everyone (who otherwise knew about computers) was thinking that i’m making up the word :-P. At the time personally i had a 20MB hard disk drive in a 286, although that was because for most of my childhood i had very old computers (still the biggest hard disk i’ve seen -in a computer :-P- was around 100MB). Gigabyte was only heard of.

    Even today the only terabyte worthy hard disk is one of my external USB drives. My computer has a 500GB hard disk (i think) which, as always, at the time seemed like it will *never* fill.

    Thanks to Steam, never say never 😛

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I suspect Steam will finally get migrated to the new drive sometime in the next week. It’s been on my primary drive, which is probably not going to be used for much anymore other than the Windows installation.

  • Karry said,

    200$ ??
    Just in July it was around 75$. That flood in Taiwan really jacked the prices in USia as well, huh ? I’m in dire need of a new HDD as well, but not for that kind of money. Its little more than highroad robbery.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    It was $150 or $160 base, but with shipping and an extended warranty it came out a bit higher.

    The flood is in Thailand – which is where I was supposed to be the last two weeks.

    Unfortunately, with a hard drive (possibly) failing, I didn’t have the luxury of time to wait until HD prices drop back down. 😛 AFAIK, they’ll be going up more over the next couple of months.

  • Modran said,

    “But will games then be taking up multiple tBs of hard drive space?”

    Yes. Yes they will…

  • Xian said,

    I hope that the new drive is up and running fine and that you were able to retrieve the data on it, or had it backed up elsewhere. Prices and capacity have really made some tremendous advances. My first floppy drive was nearly $300 for the Atari 800, and my first 47 mb drive for the Amiga was over $700. You were probably smart going with the 2 tb drive, anything over that and you need to have a newer pc that supports EFI, or an addon hard drive controller card.

    On another note, sorry to hear that you didn’t make it to Thailand. I love the place – I lived there in 95 and 96 setting up a network for a large international corporation. I was back a few years ago to visit family; my wife is Thai. The flooding didn’t affect her family in Northeast Thailand. I remember several times during the rainy season where there was such a deluge that the roads would be flooded, though nowhere near as bad or as long a duration as what is going on presently.

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