[TUHS] Storage costs (was: Re: Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from `quotes')

[David Arnold]

The Quantum Lightning 730MB drives were the tipping point for me — likely around 1994/1995?  They were readily available for just under AUD1/MB for the 50-pin narrow SCSI-2 version.  I bought heaps of them, and still have maybe half a dozen spinning today.



d

> On 25 Nov 2017, at 07:18, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 
> I remember in 1990 we got our first 1Gig drive, I paid $1000 for it.   ($1/MB).
> One of the sales guys I worked with had a unit of storage called the “Costco Terabyte.”    How much one terabyte of storage costs at Costco.
> When we started tracking it, it was around $5000.    It was down about $40 last I checked.
>   <>
> From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces at minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Henry Bent
> Sent: Friday, November 24, 2017 1:17 PM
> To: Nelson H. F. Beebe
> Cc: TUHS main list
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from `quotes'
>  
> On 24 November 2017 at 13:06, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu <mailto:beebe at math.utah.edu>> wrote:
>> P.S. In 1990, we filled a dumpster with 9-track tapes that we had to
>> abandon because of our move to new hardware that lacked such a drive,
>> and because our new disk system had insufficent disk space to preserve
>> their contents.
>> 
>> I have since regretted that decision many times, because a lot of
>> stuff was lost forever.
>> 
>> The maximum capacity of 6250-bpi 9-track tapes was about 100MB to
>> 170MB.  A thousand such tapes would have needed just 100GB to 170GB,
>> an amount of space that I can now buy in Utah for about US$4 (based on
>> a local store offering of $94 for a 4TB USB-3 attached disk about the
>> size of a paperback thriller).
>  
> Sure, but how much would 170GB of storage have cost in 1990?  And what would have been the cost to mirror it, or to back it up on to a more modern tape format?  Was that data really worth tens of thousands of dollars?
>  
> -Henry

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