Three generations of ‘hard drive’ storage side by side

Been doing drive transplantation on various machines this evening. Culminated in an upgrade of an old 2008 iMac a friend wanted, which I said I’d pop in a 2.5” SSD to at least make slightly more performant / like a modern machine…🙃

Anyhow having the three most recent generations there side by side made me chuckle how much this tech has changed in the life of that old Mac…

3 generations of hard drive - side by side photo

Crazy how in a few short years we have gone from a spinning unit to a tiny thing that fit on a motherboard that is so much faster. But more expensive.

A mate have some vintage machines, XT and AT and have old MFM full height drives in them, and they are still working but the Seagate in one gets stuck now and again. I like the sound of these old machines when they are turned on, with the click of the power switch and the hard drives starting up.

I have three generations of drives in this machine, A Toshiba 3TB spinney drive, a couple of SATA SSDs and a NvME drive. Also a Blue-ray burner.

Some machines have storage built in these days, non-removable.

Yeah that 2.5” drive came out of a Lenovo M-series Tiny box (1 litre PC type) that needed the space occupied by the drive to fit a PCIe riser card. No room at all in those boxes, but I like the form factor as I can create a nice compact mini server stack (one more to go) in no space at all.

Anyhow the Lenovo M boxes have been fitted with lovely 1TB Samsung Evo 980 NVMe M.2 “sticks” - actually not that expensive these days (surprisingly given chip/fab shortages etc.) at £115. Eight months ago I was paying £165 for the same thing. Four and half years ago (January 2018 to be precise) the previous version Evo 850 1TB cost me £260. So they have more than halved in price.

By comparison in the same period I bought 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives at £349 a piece. Now they are…exactly the same price!!

Anyhow these are certainly not the nonsensical prices that Apple charge for memory and drive upgrades!! Yeah as you say and they solder their memory now to the logic boards of M1 etc machines. So what they have from birth is what they die with. Thanks Tim, thanks Apple 😂

The old iMac was a bit of a devil to get to the drive, video showing how it’s done. It got an 2.5” SSD in place of its made for Apple original (but still perfectly working) Hitachi Deskstar 750GB 7200rpm SATA3 drive. That will take pride of place in my bottom drawer.

The weight difference blows your mind too.
Hitachi = 673g
2.5” Samsung SSD = 45g
M.2 stick = 7g

Old data must really weigh a lot!! 🤣

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Old data must really weigh a lot!! 🤣

Weight increasing with age... happens to us all

Edited by billford (Sun 29-May-22 09:38:59)

Ageing gracefully 😂