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.