WD unveils grown-up USB stick in My Passport slab form Western Digital has stuck a 1TB SSD in its My Passport line of portable storage drives – previously they have all been disks. It's a two-tone black and silver box with a diagonally fluted lower half, a duller version of the more colourful disk-based My Passport products. There is a USB Type-C connector, ready to move data at …
I think that my first hard drive, in a 386 machine, was a whopping 40MB. In the days when you still did backups onto floppy disks, and when "malware" was limited to screeching virus alarms from Central Point Anti-Virus every couple of months.
Though I miss WordPerfect 5.1, it's altogether pretty damned amazing where things have got to!
Harrumph, Off to wind the Victrola.
"I think that my first hard drive, in a 386 machine, was a whopping 40MB."
My first hard drive was also 40 MB. A 40 MB SCSI drive attached to a Mac Plus. It cost US$600. I copied all my floppies onto it and still had 20 MB left. Among my floppies were the floppies I used to write code in Modula-2 and Pascal (no, not C or any derivative thereof; C was, famously, Wirthless.) and it was amazing how unbelievably quickly I could generate syntax errors. I sold that drive with the Mac Plus about five years later. It still wasn't nearly full, or at least wasn't nearly full before I reformatted it before sale.
This morning I downloaded nearly 40 MB of email and attachments.
"Though I miss WordPerfect 5.1"
MS Word v3.x for Macintosh. The pinnacle of GUI-based word processing, it's been downhill ever since.
(Do not, on pain of death, ever mention the abomination known as Word 6 to me.)
The first hard drive I ever installed was a Shugart 5MB MFM drive. I remember having to burn a custom EPROM to tell the controller card how control the drive. The controller had about 40 ICs on it.
This was installed in an IBM XT where we removed one floppy driver to install the HUGE 5MB drive!
That was around 1983/1984?
Good idea.
Also these would be handy to store data offline, so that the backup can only be written once while generating each file and pointer would simply point to the latest copy.
If space runs out it would need a user input in the form of a progressively more complex CAPTCHA to delete anything, format etc which would guard against most ransomware.
I am amazed that this isn't routinely done, not least so eejits can't accidentally wipe out an entire TC partition which often happens if a drive is plugged into a PC and the eejit does not realize that there is encrypted data present.
.. a replacement for my hybrid backup disk.
The problem with having an SSD as a main drive is that you get used to that speed, and a bootable backup on pure spinning rust is even on USB3 excruciatingly slow to start up. Sticking a hybrid 1TB in a cradle solved that problem, and cut backup times dramatically (well, after I did a week's worth of integrity tests, I was initially worried that the caching would result in data problems) but to advice someone else on doing this proved more complex.
Now I can just point them at this and be done. Cool. I must get one myself provided the price is a bit sane, thankfully those have dropped quite a bit.
A product ahead of its time. The concept of a clean screen, apart from the page number and top/left margin settings belied the power beneath. I still support customers who use later versions of it.
Talking about legacy storage, who remembers OnTrack's venerable Disk Manager? Something that would trip up many a data recovery attempt if the presence of it were not known about.
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