Moore's Law is my friend...

[jducoeur]

... including its variants for other dimensions of computing. In this case, storage.

The CD of MP3s I'm currently burning is the one that will break the camel's back. For a long time now, I've been gradually ripping our CD collection to MP3, to listen to it on the iPod. This was a very slow process previously, but now that I'm working less than ten feet from the CD collection it's accelerated a lot -- I'm rating and ripping around four discs a day.

Last week I synch'ed the iPod, and realized that it was finally at capacity: there isn't room for another tranche of music. So msmemory got me, for a birthday present, a new iPod, which arrived yesterday. It's not a Touch, it's not an iPhone, and it's not a teeny-weeny Nano -- indeed, it looks just like my old iPod, except that the new one is black. But the new one has a preposterously huge 160 Gig hard drive in it: enough to hold our entire CD collection, plus a few movies should they strike my fancy.

Happiness is the right tool for the job -- this thing should have enough capacity to keep me for years. But a part of me is kind of boggled, when I think back to the boat-anchor-sized 5 Meg drive I started college with, and compare it with this pocket-sized gargantua...

Comments

[madamruppy.livejournal.com]

I know that feeling. I usually use the fact that my phone is exponetially more powerful than the desktop I had when I got married just 13.5 years ago.

[ckd]

You know what's really scary? My phone is more powerful than the first Unix box I was a paid sysadmin for, has almost as much storage (but not in a 5.25" full height SCSI case), and despite not being a 3G phone it also has a faster Internet connection than the leased line we were using at the time.

Admittedly, that was 1991, so with something like 10 Moore's Law doublings since then it shouldn't be too surprising.

A scene from the Future, a few months ago

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I slipped the SDRAM card out of my camera and turned to galaneia. "I'm sticking 2GB inside my mouth!!" I said.

I got the other SDRAM card out of my recorder. "I'm sticking 4GB inside my mouth! Four million K!"

Yeah, it's fun.

Re: A scene from the Future, a few months ago

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Yup. In my phone, I have a 2GB MicroSD card that's smaller than my pinky fingernail.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

I have a music server at home, to which I've uploaded about half my music. :) I do need a bigger ipod, though. My 60 gig crashes when I try to put too many of my playlists on it. Apparently you're not supposed to fill a 60 gig ipod with 60 gig of material -- who knew? :P

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

I remember that drive, don't I (Winchester)?
But I thought it was 10MB, unless that was the next one.
About the size of a full-sized AT case.

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

That sounds like the Corvus we had in high school (Ramaz, 1981 or so). Two 14-inch platters side by side in a box the size of an AT case. Partitioned into dozens of 143-K partitions, one for each student who wanted to store stuff, that being the size of an Apple ][ floppy disk. Attached to an 8-way multiplexer so you could use it from any of 8 Apple ][s in the room

To remove the operating system and replace it with whatever program is in your computer's memory (could be something simple in BASIC), peek or poke $C058. Ah, memory-mapped I/O.

[jducoeur]

I honestly don't remember which brand Winnie was -- could have been Corvus. But it was a lot easier to use than that: things had advanced considerably by 1983, when I got it. (I do remember Apple II programming, but it was all done by cassette...)

[jducoeur]

Yep, that was Winnie. I *think* it was 5 Meg, although it's certainly possible that time has played tricks on my memory again.

(The next drive after it was the one built into the 286 computer, which had tens of Meg -- lots of space at the time...)

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Yep. And I have stories in my head from my father in the Air Force, when it took oodles of paperwork to get another K of memory for the defense computers.

[dsrtao]

Video takes up even more space than music!

Video was the direct cause of me saying, completely honestly, that I was worried about only having 130GB left.

So I bought another 500GB Seagate for $90 including shipping and a 5-year warranty. In three years you won't be able to buy anything smaller than a 1TB drive except for laptops and other specialty markets.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Heck, when I got my Lady an iPod for X-mas, I was surprised to realize that it had greater storage than her laptop, which is only a few years old. In theory, she could back up her entire machine, rather than just store music.

[laurion]

My laptop still has a larger drive, but not by much. And if I kept my music on the laptop, it wouldn't really have enough room left to be a usable system. So for now I have my music on an external drive, which I have to plug in to whenever I want to sync the iPod.

I should consider investing in an inexpensive desktop, methinks.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I have been considering getting an inexpensive desktop and loading it with disk space - make it be the machine backups are done to, bulk storage of music, and so on.

Since I am a glutton for punishment, I've been waiting to see if Windows Home Server would turn out to be useful to me.

[laurion]

I've been considering some sort of inexpensive NAS with audio support, actually, but I'm not sure if that will fit my needs either. I've already *got* a machine sitting there on the network with a lot of diskspace. It's the computer I've loaded up with tuner cards and drive, and use as a TiVo. But I don't have a good way figured out yet to keep the music there and still sync the iPod from the laptop. That computer is in the living room, and the only screen hooked up to it is the TV, which isn't a digital TV, so isn't super useful as a monitor. Nor is it useful for accessing remotely by SSH/VNC. Nor would wireless access from the laptop be nearly as practical as firewire/USB2 access. I'm really at the point where I need a system that is part server, part desktop. The laptop can do the latter, not the former. The media center can do the former, not the latter.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I've got a similar situation. The desktop machine that I'm actually sync'ing the iPod to has enough disk (I think -- need to check), but the laptop that I'm actually ripping on (my work laptop) is nearly maxed out. So I'm going to have to start a cycle of ripping, moving the rips to the desktop, and clearing space.

(Or buy a new external drive for the laptop, just for iTunes. That *may* not be insane...)

[laurion]

I'm edging up to capacity on my 80gb. But that's because I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 CDs. Lord help me if I ever start putting video on it.

[jducoeur]

Just so -- I haven't counted our CDs, but it's somewhere north of 1200. That was one of the main motivations for going all-out...

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Glad you like it, Beloved.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Now you've got me trying to figure out just how many punched cards'd be needed to hold the iPod contents...

[jducoeur]

Did you actually work in Hollerith cards? I just missed them -- I started in the waning days of paper tape, working on PDP-8s and teletypes...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Yep, my freshling year CS classes were Hollerith based. The tradition was to save all your programs, remove any identifying comment cards, and at the end of term toss the set from as near the top of a tall U building as possible and watch them flutter down.