So, I am a professional system administrator. It says it on my business cards and everything. Every couple of months, when I have to explain to the receptionist at the London office that yes, I do work here, and so
Nicholas Avenell (Aquarionics) wrote:
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(My first hard drive for the Amiga 600 was second hand from my dad’s old laptop. It was SIXTY MEGABYTES. It held DOZENS of games. I would need over EIGHT HUNDRED of those drives to hold a 50Gb World of Warcraft install).
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I remember my first hard drive. It was 40Mb, and that felt flipping MASSIVE because I’d previously, like most people, been using floppy disks of no larger than 1.44Mb. My second hard drive was 105Mb and it felt like a huge step-up; I ripped my first MP3s onto that drive, and didn’t care for a moment that they each consumed 2%-3% of the available space (and took about 15 minutes each to encode).
Nowadays I look at my general-purpose home desktop’s 12TB RAID array and I think to myself… yeah, but it’s over half full… probably time to plan for the next upgrade. What happened‽ Somewhere along the line hard drive space became like mobile phone battery level became before it: something where you start to worry if you have less than half left. I don’t know how we got here and I’m not sure I’m happy about it, but suffice to say: technology today is nuts.