Music

Storage Gone Wild

I bought my first computer almost twenty years ago.  It came with four megabites of RAM and 40 megabites (yes, megabites) of HDD storage.  When I doubled the RAM, it cost me $800.  Think how much computing power you can buy for that kind of coin at an ordinary Best Buy today.

Times have certainly changed.  I have several machines at my house.  My standard work PC has 12 GM of RAM and 4TB’s worth of drives in a RAID. All my music is on an iMac with a 1TB drive backed up to a 1TB Time Capsule.  For Boxing Day, I’m going to treat myself to a Drobo NAS with at leat 10TB of storage so I can continue to digitally archive my stupidly huge CD collection.

Check out this great infographic on how our ability to store stuff has increased over the a relatively short time.

Oh, and the picture?  That’s an old IBM hard drive unit.  I weighed more than a ton and had a capacity of 5 megabites.  Then again, it was 1956.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 37897 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

4 thoughts on “Storage Gone Wild

  • Drobo rocks. Ive got a drobo S and love the redundancy combined with being able to mix and match drives.

    Reply
  • Megabytes – MB
    Gigabytes- GB

    Reply
  • Interesting post from a user perspective. I'm all too familiar with the 4MB RAM/40MB disk system you reference – it hasn't yet faded from my memory. It isn't really all that different from users vs. the developers. as it doesn't seem all that long ago when I made linux work on only 1MB RAM. Looking back, that seems so sadly crippled — yet at the time it seemed pretty good. Add 10 years and what shall we see?

    Reply
  • I gave up digitizing my collection once I got onto Rdio (thanks to your suggestion). What's the point? Sure, some of the rarer stuff is worth converting, but otherwise, I'll just pay for the subscription, and have access to almost all my stuff, and then a whole bunch of other stuff I never had.

    Your post added an extra dimension to the cost-benefit analysis though. I figured the monthly cost was pretty much offset by what I would pay for to purchase music in a month, but factoring in the added cost of storage, it's a definite advantage.

    Reply

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