Back in the 80's, I purchased the Tulin 33MB (that's megabyte with the M)
full height hard drive for $2,499, the largest hard drive for the IBM PC.
I still have the receipt for it from Crazy Bob's Computer Warehouse.
Crazy Bob took me for a ride in his hot air balloon because I was a good
customer and crazy enough to go..(c;

Walking through Best Buy's computer department, I always scope out the
prices on USB gadgets that may prove useful to my favorite hobby
(obsession?, ask Skip). There's been quite a rapid increase in hard
drive capacity recently in this depressed economy and prices have been
falling like flies. Given how worthless the Federal Reserve
Corporation's money has gotten, I don't see how they can produce the
computer stuff they do at a profit, without using slave labor.

I keep tabs on the price of serious storage, namely external USB hard
drives I can carry around from computer to computer, including my laptop.
The laptop enjoys a 160GB Western Digital tiny little USB-powered drive
that fits right in your shirt pocket, a little plastic brick. Well,
there it sat and I lost the battle to get out of there.....

Best Buy has a special running on the Western Digital "Essential
Edition" "My Book" SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY GIGABYTE USB hard drive for only
$179! They had 8 of them on the shelf! 750GB is quite a space. 187,500
4MB MP3 songs. 1071 full length DivX movies will also fit on it.
Millions of magazines, books, and other pdf files. This is the size of a
good novel. The box is made to look like a black book with a green
lighted ring on the binder. WD has made carrying it even easier. My two
500GB My Book drives have power supplies you sit on the desk with 2
cords, one 12VDC, the other the line cord. This new drive has a TINY
little switcher that plugs sideways into any AC outlet not blocking other
plugs and weighs about an ounce! It puts out 2A at 12V, max.

The key for boaters is the 12V. These power supplies are NOT highly
regulated. The regulators are INSIDE the My Book drive boxes. So, if a
boater were to stop by any Radio Shack and buy the appropriate 12V power
cord for a pittance....VOILA! You have a boat-powered, 750GB hard drive
for the laptop, direct! I've run my 500GB My Books off a 5AH 12V gelcell
quite successfully. Plugging it into your boat battery will work
wonderfully as it only draws about 800ma once it's running and goes to
sleep automatically, even shutting off automatically with the USB port if
you shutdown or hibernate the computer.

Well, just thought you'd like to know about this bargain at Best Buy. I
bought TWO, another 1.5TB (with the T) to add to the collection. My
laptop's gonna explode one of these days....(c;

No need to carry 800 pounds of books hogging all that space in the
playroom full of bookshelves. The Library of Congress stores with 500
movies in the space of Moby Dick. She'll sail faster with digital
storage! No fragile CDs or DVDs to worry over, either!

......under 24 cents/gigabyte! Hard drives are getting cheaper than DVDs!

Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 03:30:57 +0000, Larry wrote:

.....under 24 cents/gigabyte! Hard drives are getting cheaper than DVDs!

Is this solid state "flash" memory technology or something else?

Wayne.B wrote in
:

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 03:30:57 +0000, Larry wrote:

.....under 24 cents/gigabyte! Hard drives are getting cheaper than
DVDs!

Is this solid state "flash" memory technology or something else?


It's a humongous Western Digital 750GB hard drive in an external, self-
powered black plastic case that looks like a book. It plugs into your
USB2 port on any computer with USB2 ports and runs off 12VDC from its own
wall brick or a 12V cord from Radio Shack, if you like. Flash memories
are only up to about 8GB, now, 742GB short of this beast. Beast is in
memory, not physical.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=324

http://images.bestbuy.com/BestBuy_US...emailpdf/08280
7_sept_ese_coupons.pdf
Here, get up to 12% MORE off this great price by printing out this coupon
and taking it with you to the Best Buy Store....Store Only coupon! I'm
going back up, after finding this, and get my 12% off as a credit card
refund....(c;

That will make it 750GB for $158.39 and tax, instead...(c;


Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

Y'all can try to get them to honor the sale......but as I went to BestBuy
to get my $24+ coupon discount, I looked to see how many drives were left.

THE PRICE HAS BEEN INCREASED BACK TO $279.95 FOR THIS HARD DRIVE.

Sorry if you missed it.....(c;

Mine still has almost 300GB unused! Grabit's working on that....(c;

Larry

Larry wrote:
Y'all can try to get them to honor the sale......but as I went to BestBuy
to get my $24+ coupon discount, I looked to see how many drives were left.

THE PRICE HAS BEEN INCREASED BACK TO $279.95 FOR THIS HARD DRIVE.

Sorry if you missed it.....(c;

Yup ... and that will probably be the cheapest price ever for storage -
from now on the price will only go up!

Many years ago when I worked with NASA I got a tour of a facility in
Greenbelt. It was a disk farm with hundreds of washing machine sized
drives, each about 200 Megabytes, for a total of about half a Terabyte.
It contained all of the telemetry from every scientific satellite for
about six months. Now that much storage can fit in your pocket!

On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:24:07 -0400, jeff wrote:

Many years ago when I worked with NASA I got a tour of a facility in
Greenbelt. It was a disk farm with hundreds of washing machine sized
drives, each about 200 Megabytes, for a total of about half a Terabyte.
It contained all of the telemetry from every scientific satellite for
about six months. Now that much storage can fit in your pocket!

I worked with almost every generation of IBM "washing machine" sized
disk from the late 60s onward, starting with something called the
2311. They were 3.625 meg per cabinet and cost upwards of $30,000
back when that could buy a decent house or really nice boat.

jeff wrote in
:

Larry wrote:
Y'all can try to get them to honor the sale......but as I went to
BestBuy to get my $24+ coupon discount, I looked to see how many
drives were left.

THE PRICE HAS BEEN INCREASED BACK TO $279.95 FOR THIS HARD DRIVE.

Sorry if you missed it.....(c;

Yup ... and that will probably be the cheapest price ever for storage
- from now on the price will only go up!

Many years ago when I worked with NASA I got a tour of a facility in
Greenbelt. It was a disk farm with hundreds of washing machine sized
drives, each about 200 Megabytes, for a total of about half a
Terabyte.
It contained all of the telemetry from every scientific satellite
for
about six months. Now that much storage can fit in your pocket!

One of my ham friends is a field service engineer for EMC in SC. Ever
see a Symmetrix box work? 100,000 RPM IBM amazing drives....all
mirrored. Massive $33K cache cards full of SIMs. Error free to the
customer. Simply amazing technology. The net's stored on them, I'm
told. Data happens so fast, it jams NT-based systems like the one Piggly
Wiggly grocery chain uses, here. They had to design a special piece of
software to make the Symmetrix wait until NT could handle the next packet
pouring out the fibre pipe hammering it.

It even calls for its own service! There's a laptop running in the door
that's bolted to the door. It has its own phone line. When the box's
main computer detects an error, it figures out what is wrong and
transfers this data to the laptop in the door. The software in the
laptop calls EMC's dispatchers and tells them what's wrong and what parts
it needs. They dispatch the information to Charles' cellphone. He goes
to his local warehouse, picks the parts and heads out to the box in his
Jeep. When he shows up is the first time the customer's IT guys have a
hint something is amiss, soon to be repaired. Their data never varied.
Charles opens the refridgerator-sized box, hot swaps the hardware and
hangs around until the main computer is satisfied with his replacement
after a special test mode exercises it. Once the customer's data is
written to any swapped drives or is back in action on other hardware...He
punches some keys on the folded down laptop and cancels the
call...insuring a fat check on payday. The customer doesn't call until
it is consumed by the fire...(c;

No, you don't want one. It runs on 440VAC 3-phase under heavy air
conditioning only an IT center can produce. My little drives run on a
gelcell...(c;


Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

jeff wrote in
:

Larry wrote:
Y'all can try to get them to honor the sale......but as I went to
BestBuy to get my $24+ coupon discount, I looked to see how many
drives were left.

THE PRICE HAS BEEN INCREASED BACK TO $279.95 FOR THIS HARD DRIVE.

Sorry if you missed it.....(c;

Yup ... and that will probably be the cheapest price ever for storage
- from now on the price will only go up!

Many years ago when I worked with NASA I got a tour of a facility in
Greenbelt. It was a disk farm with hundreds of washing machine sized
drives, each about 200 Megabytes, for a total of about half a
Terabyte.
It contained all of the telemetry from every scientific satellite
for
about six months. Now that much storage can fit in your pocket!


At Cornell University, way back when..., I was honored by being allowed
to peek into a room containing a huge IBM DRUM DRIVE. It stored many KB,
er, ah, temporarily, until a truck drove by on the street
outside....which is why we were not allowed to actually WALK into the
room! Even the massive granite block it was bolted to could save it. It
brought new meaning to "crash"...

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ex.../650_ph09.html



Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 00:45:10 +0000, Larry wrote:

At Cornell University, way back when..., I was honored by being allowed
to peek into a room containing a huge IBM DRUM DRIVE. It stored many KB,
er, ah, temporarily, until a truck drove by on the street

I worked at Cornell for a while in the mid to late 60s. At that time
the main campus system had graduated to IBM 2314 disks which packed a
whopping 7.294 megs into a washing machine sized cabinet. Most of the
campus was running on a 360/65 mainframe with 512KB of main memory.
Nowadays you couldn't even boot up WinXP on a box of that size let
alone run an entire university. People used to wonder why the 360/65
used to slow down at busy times even though it had cost all of those
millions.

Wayne.B wrote in
:

I worked with almost every generation of IBM "washing machine" sized
disk from the late 60s onward, starting with something called the
2311. They were 3.625 meg per cabinet and cost upwards of $30,000
back when that could buy a decent house or really nice boat.



Yeah, on that same IBM museum website there's big, tall disk platter
cabinets with glass fronts so you can watch the platters spinning (and I
suppose occasionally crashing)...(c;

It's a great tour through IBMland from the beginnings. They saved all
the pictures. There's even the IBM-PC blazing along at 4.77 Mhz of
breathtaking speed! Whoda evah thunk it?

Spozed to go sailin' with friends on a lazy Saturday around Charleston
Harbor next weekend. I'm stripping some great sailing music off:
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.easy-listening
tonight. It's that dreamy smooth kind of music to smooth your fingertips
over an exposed length of sensitive skin. Hope the women are wearin'
their thongs...(c; Thongs and Dana Dragomir's pan flute...hmmm... A
l'il smooth piano music for later after dinner. Slow dancin' stuff.

Larry
--
Sunshine and 4 knots should be about right. We'll make a pot of Bloody
Mary in the coffee pot.