I've still got an old external SCSI hard drive that was bought from
Power Max a number of
years ago. It's worked well with my beige
G3 tower - and several other machines before it. This was a great
hard drive for storing data, but it wasn't especially fast if you
decided to boot off of it or run applications from it.
The drive itself is a full-height 3.5" hard drive, which is three
times the height of the hard drives that ship with most modern
machines. Some people might even remember 5.25" full height hard drives
that cost thousands or the external hard drives (usually 5.25" half
height) that often sat under a Mac
Plus. For about $1,000 you could get a 30 MB drive.
These days a movie trailer wouldn't even fit on there. It might be
able to hold one album of MP3 files, if that.
That 30 MB drive also most likely wouldn't fit inside a new Power
Mac, much less function correctly (though if you added a SCSI card, it
could work). Considering that these days 30 GB is considered small,
there wouldn't be much reason to install an old 30 MB drive in a
G-series Mac anyway.
Nowadays the typical hard drives inside desktop computers are 3.5",
half or 1/3 height. Notebook drives are even smaller, 2.5"!
How about the tiny little hard drives in the iPods? The ones in the
first iPods aren't much bigger than the battery! I thought squeezing
5 GB into a device of that size was amazingÖ.
The new iPod Mini however, represents a change from the more typical
hard drive formats. The mini uses a Compact Flash size device, the
4 GB Hitachi MicroDrive. Interestingly enough, this drive retails
for $479.95, so if you buy an iPod Mini and tear it apart for the
drive, you can save money. (Why would you want to take apart a $250
iPod Mini when you can do the same to less expensive Creative MuVo MP3
player, I don't know)
Technology's really come down in size in the past few years. The
4 GB SCSI drive I have probably dates from about 1997. While it
wasn't exactly the latest in terms of technology for 1997, it wasn't
necessarily outdated, either, given that 4 GB drives were shipping
with beige G3s.
Since the MicroDrive is the same size as a standard Compact Flash
card, today you can have 4 GB of storage space in a digital
camera. This, of course, allows for more pictures at higher
resolutions. Switching Compact Flash cards would become a thing of the
past. [Editor's note: There are 4 GB Compact Flash cards - but at
$1,500, who can afford them?]
The question that still exists, though, is how much smaller can hard
drives get? A few years ago I probably would've said that a 2.5"
notebook hard drive was about the smallest that could be made. Since
we've seen that is clearly not the case, I have little doubt that we'll
continue to see even smaller drives.
Eventually, though, it'll get to a point where the drive can no
longer be made physically smaller. Perhaps we'll then turn to types of
memory for storage. In fact, some of the old 286 and earlier laptop
computers used a special type of memory as a drive.
The Outbound Laptop, a Mac
clone, also came with a built in RAM disk. It's clear that memory can
be used as storage; it's just a matter of time before we see the hard
drive becoming a thing of the past.
