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SSDs

Today I learned that my current collection of solid-state drives would have cost me about a quarter of a million dollars back when I first got going with the machines.

Aside from it being a reminder to depreciate the cost of computers on your taxes, it's fascinating to see the technology go up while the cost go down. The cost was about $10 per GB in 2000. I remember buying my first big disk of 100GB for about a grand. Of course I also remember paying thousands for a computer that had 1GB of memory and now I've got almost 100. There's a nice little graphic of the historical cost of computer memory and storage @ History of hard disk drives1.

I usually do this process around the start of the new year. I'm only ahead of it this year because I recently had remote server failure2 and shuffling the disks around had my local drives in a bit of a mess moving 100s of gigs around. I'm now using three SSDs3 with 11TB of storage. I use the one with Thunderbolt 54 just for temporary storage since it's the fastest and I use the other two for my server and computer backups.

I have files going back to 1997 if you don't count the since digitized old slides and documents which go back to the 1960s. It's funny to see the amount of cruft I stuffed on old drives thinking it'd be important for whatever reason. I now realize that the priority is mostly just words and images in various formats. I'll never rebuild something using the outdated software of code from the early 2000s. If I had to duplicate or republish an old project, I'd bring it up to speed and I'm sure it'd be fun trying to open various databases or file formats.

The most precious artifacts in my backups are old photos, videos, and audio recordings. Maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, but it really is amazing that I can move 20 thousand files in a couple of minutes and store them on a drive for a couple hundred dollars. I think the irony of the rapid expansion of AI data centers5 is about the same as me having all my fifty year old computer files.



Footnotes​

  1. History of hard disk drives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives ↩

  2. Easy Start - https://davidawindham.com/til/posts/easy-start ↩

  3. Solid-state drive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive ↩

  4. Thunderbolt(interface) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) ↩

  5. Technological singularity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity ↩