11–20 of 38 posts
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
Norton Ghost?..
Looks like it was 140MB at highest density.
Now, excuse me a moment, while I try to get those pesky kids off of my lawn.
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
That's why they say that disk is the new tape. Releative to the sequential data rate, disk seeks are almost as expensive as a robot changing a tape reel used to be.
Tape seek times (for half a tape) are closer to 40s, which is still 100x more. We'll have to wait a while yet before disk is the new tape in terms of cost of seeks, even when comparing the 70s to today.
That's only considering latency. The cost consideration is a completely different story.
We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work.
I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes.
And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn't really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access.
So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest.
So something like acrobat documents, which are basically trying to preserve a flat document, is actually a pretty good format, and is likely to last a pretty long time. But I am not confident that these standards will remain. I think the philosophical implication is that we have to really care about knowledge. If we care about knowledge it will be preserved. And this is true knowledge in general, because knowledge is not just information. Because each generation is preserving the knowledge it cares about and of course a lot of that knowledge is preserved from earlier times, but we have to sort of re-synthesize it and re-understand it, and appreciate it anew.
Source:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_kurzweil_interview_contin...
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
It wasn't rare at all to find fair sized servos (as opposed to steppers in consumer grade stuff in the 80's) in those old disk pack units (the size of a washing machine).
You can't really compare 'common 7200 RPM drives' of today with a top-of-the-line medium from the 70's, physics didn't change at all in that time. That's why there are 'servo tracks' on the drive, they help with finding the right track (in a stepper scenario you don't actually need those, the stepper resolution defines where the tracks are).
Today enterprise level drives achieve That's where the real improvement factor sits: performance (both in capacity, seek time and transfer rates) vs cost.
And that's many orders of magnitude.
Norton Ghost?..
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
Average seek time across a disk which is much larger physically than the disks in use today. It wasn't rare at all to find fair sized servos (as opposed to steppers in consumer grade stuff in the 80's) in those old disk pack units (the size of a washing machine). You can't really compare 'common 7200 RPM drives' of today with a top-of-the-line medium from the 70's, physics didn't change at all in that time. That's wh…
Specs on storage module drive: http://ia600707.us.archive.org/32/items/9760_9762_oct73/9760... . The unit has an average seek time of 30ms in 1973. Today, in common 7200 RPM drives, it seems to be around 8-9ms. There is only a factor of improvement of 3 to 4 times. I find this pleasantly surprising.
That's pretty impressive. Not only did they image the disk, it was a disk that had had a head crash and one damaged head which they managed to restore to functioning well enough to capture the data. Now of course the big question: what is on that disk?