It's been a while since I had a truly big "WOW" moment, but today is one of those days.
But first some "back story" over the last 30 years !!.
I bought my first PC back in 1988, which had a 12 MHz 80286 CPU, 1Mb of RAM, an orange monochrome monitor, a Hercules graphics card and a 5 1/4" high density (ie 1.2Mb) floppy drive, which ran MSDOS 5. I got it for work, as my firm wouldn't buy me one !!
This had some limitations but I could run "MS Word 5.5" and "As-Easy-As" (a Lotus 123 clone) from the floppy and all was well.
I needed some more storage and faster access, so a hard drive was acquired soon after - a 5 1/4" Seagate 20Mb MFM drive and a ISA-bus controller to go with it. That cost me about £300 !!
Fast forward a wee bit, and over time, a second MFM drive was bought (a 40 Mb) and then a colour monitor, a CDROM drive and then various upgraded parts as PCs were (and still are) basically modular so you can replace various parts as you upgrade.
But I digress....
The 40 Mb MFM drive was replaced with a 270 Mb SCSI drive (for about £400), and Adaptec AHA2742 SCSI controller - and as you can have up to 7 SCSI devices, so I added more SCSI hard drives (540 MB) as well as a rather neat Panasonic optical read/write drive (for backing up).
In time, a stack of SCSI drives wasn't enough, so I changed to IDE and got a 1.2 Gb drive...
And over time, that has been upgraded too and my home PC now has a 3.5" 500 GB HDD and my work PC has a 3.5" 1 Tb HDD. I also have a nice Synology RAID5 NAS box for my ripped CDs - that's about 8 Tb.
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And now back to today:
I've just read a report about some new SSD devices, which when they become available will just kill off spinning rust type hard drives.
The first, available by mid-2019, are 2.5" 64 Tb SSDs from Samsung, using "96-layer QLC 3D NAND with a 1Tbit die size".
The second, designed by Nimbus, are 2.5" 100 Tb SSDs using MLC (2bits/cell) planar (2D) flash. They will have a SATA interface.
Of course, these will be expensive and designed for enterprise level servers and the like.
But the article states:
This is proper scary stuff... 100 Tb of storage on a PC !!After 96 layers, the flash foundry operators have 128-layer NAND coming. If they manage this technology transition, then 100 TB small form factor PCs are theoretically possible.
The full story can be read here:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/1 ... 100tb_ssd/
So, what with multi-threaded CPUs, plenty of RAM and mega-Tb storage, the ability of these PCs is going to be staggering.
Mind you - lots of people will just use them for playing games
regards
Tim