And Apple be like. 128gb HDD or upgrade to a 512gb SSD for $600 extra or a 1tb nvme for $1000 extra
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
420 points (98.4% liked)
Mildly Interesting
21442 readers
707 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I just got a new laptop today and when I saw the ssd it blew my mind. Most of my old drives are like the second from left and it's what I think of as a normal drive, buying a standard ssd still feels small to me. But look at that tiny thing to the right! It's the size of a postage stamp!
Assuming I managed to find the right specs (it is a Microscience hh-1050): The monster on the far left is from 1990, holds 40mb, read/write of 0.625mb/s, and weighs almost exactly 2kg. The baby on the far right I got in the mail today, holds 1tb, read/write of 5150mb/s, and weighs about 2.85 grams.
So we're looking at 25,000 times more storage, 8,240 times faster, and 1/700th the weight! And the one on the right is just 1tb, they make one that same model but 2tb. I can barely believe it exists even though I'm literally holding it in my hands.
lack of education is Apple's bread and butter.
Apple livea on the notion of 'a fool and his money are soon parted' and can you blame them? They are one of, if not the, most profitable companies around. If it works why change it.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Wait, 1tb?
You're leaving impact on the table, I have plenty of 1tb micro SD cards.
Those drives typically have some pretty dreadful read/write speeds (for a computer). Maybe once SD Express is figured out we'll get fast and good Micro SD cards at a high capacity.
And they crap out so quickly. I can't even count the number of SD cards I've had to throw in the trash. I don't think I've ever had a 2.5" or 3.5" drive completely crap out on me (though I have had bad SMART data indicative of a dying drive) and I have been running a media server with dozens of TBs for over a decade now.
Invest in Samsung Pro Endurane SD cards, they last a lot longer. I believe Sandisk has a similar product but I have never used it.
There are way too many counterfeit cards mixed in with the legitimate stock out there for me to bother spending too much on any single card. I typically go for the midrange offerings and roll the dice.
I don't know What everyone does to get counterfeit cards all the time. I never had one. Are they just less prevalent in Europe than in America? Maybe it's because I don't buy them online?
load more comments
(1 replies)
I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we'll get those for cheap.
In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we're comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I'm gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren't even near the bottom of the specs table.
Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that's because people like simple things more than true things.
Apples and oranges, though. The left two are hard drives, the right two are solid state drives (ie flash memory). They kind of serve the same purpose, but there is quite a big step in between 2 and 3. 2.5" HDDs also exist, though. Then again, so do 1TB MicroSD cards. And 2280 M.2 SSDs. But also huge tapes that are still in use for backup purposes.
Ahh yes, I remember my first Seagate ST225. A whopping 20 MB of storage for the low low price of 800 bucks.
I remember being astounded by the 8GB backup tapes that fit in my shirt pocket.
In the compsci building at uni, there is a museum of sorts in the hall to the labs. At the beginning of the storage section, there is a 20Mb storage device. It is the size of a washing machine, I have no idea how much it weighs, but it has to be in the 100's of kg range.
Sitting on top are much more modern devices, 5.25"/3.5"/2.5" drives; I haven't been back for a decade to know if they kept going as tech improved.
"Sitting on top" is a brilliant way to display that.
Very effective.
The RAM section with the hand woven memory modules is so awesome. 1kb of RAM; tiny iron rings with fine copper wires threaded through them.
Is that NVME only half length still with a full TB? It almost looks to be the same size as an M.2 wifi adapter. Crazy that they're getting this small.
I recently bought two cheaper 1TB NVME and have some premium ones from several years ago but they're all the full 80mm length. I have yet to come across ones this small personally.
2280 seems to be the most common DIY size, 2230 is common for business machines, sometimes in an adapter to fit a normal 2.5" HDD bay or a slot large enough for 2280. I just removed one from the 2280 adapter last week to get data off after the storm came through the east coast.
The fact that those measurements are in inches when “2280” means 22mm x 80mm agitates me.
Welcome to merica!
There's terabyte SD cards now, that are almost that fast.
They are more limited in storage space than the 2280s but yeah the thing is tiny, almost 1/3 length even at 30mm. It's literally the size of a postage stamp I'm stunned
It really is amazing, and just popping an m.2 into a motherboard directly is just so... easy. And I think Gen5s are what, 2.5x faster than what you're showing here?
The screw situation is finicky. It's a weird mix between you're supposed to have screws from your case/motherboard or sometimes the drive comes with one. But if you move stuff and drop the tiny tiny screw it's a hassle. Every motherboard should just have the little tab you just turn to keep it in place.
Plus the newer gen fast drives get hot so they need a heatsink. The fastest maybe need heatsink plus airflow. So then you need an extra fan if you don't have enough airflow which is easy because it's flush against the motherboard and sometimes blocked by the GPU.
Full agree on the screw situation, although my most recent mobi addressed that with a sort of... turnable plastic lock thing? And a built in heatsink and "shield" for the gen 5 and 4 ports, so I haven't had any issues with heat. I get the sense we'll have a better standard as time goes in though, Gen5 is really really new.
But even the gen 3s are lovely. Maybe I just hate SATA cables, haha.
It'd be gnar if the smallest one was also a magnetic platter hard drive.
The smallest old style hard drive I can think of is the iPod. But now I want to know if any magnetic platter drives got smaller than that... 🤔
Afaik, it's all been solid state after that. Even newer iPods.
It's so tiny! 😍
Omg it was made in 1998?! :O
Pulled from my Life drive :)
And further into the article: "Toshiba decided to skip the 1" form factor, and in March 2004 announced a 0.85" drive that shipped in September of the same year.[38] "
load more comments
(1 replies)
gnar
You made me think of GWAR
Gwar is pretty gnar.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Oldest hard drives I've dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.
I remember all the formats shown.
My first machine was an AST Research 286 16Mhz (in "turbo" mode) with two 5-1/4" floppy drives, and a 40 MB 5-1/4" hard drive. I paid ~$2000 for it in the late 80s. That was a good move, I knew more about computers than most people applying for jobs at the time, and that allowed me to make a decent living without a college degree.
How to say you are over 50 without saying you are over 50. I'm a A little younger, so in the 90s 20MB drive wasn't $2000. First time I had Ms dos boot from a hdd instead of floppy. The first time I ever 'installed' was f16 fighting falcon. The loading speed was phenomenal for the time.
I think I have two I could put on the left side. A "full-height" 5.25 inch drive with 5 megabytes and a DEC removable disk platter assembly, somewhere over a foot in diameter and 8 to 10 inches high. I don't remember how much capacity that had. It was for a RP04 or RP06 drive.
You could go back further to the drives mini computers used to use, which basically for in a file cabinet. Or old mainframes, which were the file cabinet.
I started on 3.5" HDDs in the 90s. I am running 3.5" HDDs today. They are still the most cost efficient.
Do manufacturers use the extra space for larger batteries, or just to make the product smaller overall?
Yes.
This is for desktop PC. But the correct answer is overall smaller because if you only had spinny drives a lot of small devices wouldn't be possible.
Having grown up along with the computer industry, sometimes I have that surreal sense of awe when I remember where we came from and what I used to consider cutting edge. Just upgraded my computer with a few SSDs, one an M.2, and before I put it in I was looking at it and trying to come to grasp with the scale of things (size and speed) vs. my first C-64 computer and Datasette. I know the numbers...they don't convey the difference in the head.
view more: next ›