1 TB at Wal-mart

[jwkwd]

With the growing use of digital this and that, I was surprized that Wal-mart now carries one tera-bite external hard drives. I just thought that was pretty cool to see. I am getting old and remember being told that you would never need more than 4 megs of RAM, and who would ever need more than a GIG of hard drive space ? :mrgreen:

 

[Big Mike]

It wasn't that long ago that my computer had a 500 MB hard drive...now I have memory cards with 4 times that much storage space. I remember when I had Commodore & Atari computers without any hard drive at all.

I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.

Abe Simpson

 

[CMan]

When I think about what's gone on in my lifetime...

I can remember a time when digital photography was unheard of. I can also recall when a 4 MP camera was the absolute top of the line and very, very expensive; $800-$1,000 for a point and shoot. A 1 MP was about $150 if I recall correctly.

I remember when a 20 GB hard drive was pretty good, (you've got me beat with the 500MB, BigMike) and 64 MB of RAM was a bunch. I also remember when LCD TV's didn't exist, 20 inches was a really big size, and nobody watched anything in HD because nobody had heard of it.

What's scary is that I'm only 14.:er: What about when I'm 24, or 54. What will have happened by then? What will be obscelescent?

 

[fmw]

When I think about what's gone on in my lifetime...

I can remember a time when digital photography was unheard of. I can also recall when a 4 MP camera was the absolute top of the line and very, very expensive; $800-$1,000 for a point and shoot. A 1 MP was about $150 if I recall correctly.

I can remember when the ball point pen was invented.

 

[ironsidephoto]

i remember upgrading my computer to have a cd-burner and a 40 gig hard drive.
funny to think that one picture from a high-end camera wouldn't have fit on a floppy.


(obscelescent?)

 

[Highspeed]

About 10 years ago when I was in HS I remember a computer tech coming to our house and putting a 1g harddrive in our computer. He told my parents that if we ever filled up that 1g harddrive, we had to much junk on our computer. lol

 

[neea]

What's scary is that I'm only 14.:er: What about when I'm 24, or 54. What will have happened by then? What will be obscelescent?

I hear ya CMan. I'm 21 and it amazes me how much things have changed to.

I love hearing stories from parents and grandparents.

 

[RacePhoto]

I can remember when the ball point pen was invented.

Wow 1938! Glad to see I'm not the oldest "old fart" around here?

In grade school we had teachers that refused to accept any homework done with a ballpoint pen. They complained about the blobs of ink.

However when I went to college, they taught punch cards and the computer "building" was just that an air conditioned building.

My extra cool graduation gift was a Smith Corona portable electric typewriter. About the same time I got my first "real" camera, a Canon FT-QL SLR with a 1.4 lens. Wow talk about HOT! (and I still have it and was still using it until I went digital) Exciting things to do in the lab included processing in hot Acufine and pushing TriX to 1200 or 1600 ASA.

My first computer had a cassette drive for loading saved data, and that was new technology. (disk drive was a 7 inch floppy and only the big computers like a Wang word processor used those) The Apple IIe wasn't invented yet. That had 64kb of memory.

The first time someone scanned one of my pictures for me, 1995, it was a BMP and was 447x296 from a 5x7. I thought it was really neat. 396kb file for one picture!

One picture from my 10D takes two times the storage space that 24 pictures from my Mavica (on floppy) would take. One picture takes more memory than my first IBM 8086 computer had in it. That computer had a HUGE 20mb hard drive.

An 8 or 16mb memory card was big enough for me to take many pictures with my various digital cameras. Now we throw them away because a 512mb card is about as small as one wants to go. :er:

CMan you have all the good stuff ahead of you. I'll be long obsolete by the time you reach 54. :hail:

 

[RacePhoto]

I hear ya CMan. I'm 21 and it amazes me how much things have changed to.

I love hearing stories from parents and grandparents.

I had to walk four miles to school every day. Both ways uphill.

But back to photography.

You actually had to focus the camera yourself. The light meter was not through the lens, in fact most cameras had no light meter. You used a hand held meter. You got good pictures by taking a light reading, maybe a one direct and one indirect then setting the shutter speed and then the aperature depending on how your wanted the picture to come out.

Or you could just say, "hmm, Sunny day, f/8 1/125th seems right." and shoot. B&W film has great latitude. Then 4 days later, get your prints back and see what happened, because unless you had your own dark room, it took that long, even for black and white. Slides took longer.

I don't miss it one bit. Good Old days? Bah Humbug!

 

[Iron Flatline]

I remember when B&H was a smaller store, just off 7th Avenue.

 

[fmw]

I have a nagging concern about image archiving. Hard drives have a life span. Every single one will eventually fail. So there needs to be a backup. Currently, I put my images on DVD RW but who knows how long those will be readable? I've thought about getting a RAID and a couple of spare drives for it but that is a pretty expensive option. For me, this is the biggest issue of digital photography. I can still enjoy the chromes I made in the 1950's. How long will I be able to see my digital images?

 

[CMan]

That is a very big concern with many, myself included.

I had a bunch of papers I'd written on a floppy disk, but it's no good because I can't find a computer anywhere with a floppy disk reader.

How long before it's that way with CD's/DVD's? Plus, as you said, they will probably all become unreadable eventually.

That's one of the reasons a friend of mine said he was still shooting film; because he would always have it.

 

[jwkwd]

I have seen Commadore's and Atari's getting top dollar on the auction site, I have a brand new in the box Apple 5.25" disk drive. Hmmm, I wonder where I could get disks for it....or drivers. It seems that it would work with Linux. I also remember my first camera taking 35mm film, wait a minute, I still use film!

 

[Azuth]

Hard drives have a reasonable life span, and because of the way we store data you will be able to copy from a hard drive to whatever medium comes next. It's still possible to copy a text file from an 5 1/4" FDD to a modern PC, a pain sure, but the average joe can still obtain the tools to do it quite cheaply. Given that they were in common use in to the mid 80's it would appear that there's still a capability to go back 15-20 years in technology if required.

In terms of file format you can still read obscure word processing files from the same period with modern software and converters that come bundled with it. Image files are unlikely to be different.

It's just going to be a matter of using the time and energy to transition from old to new. The good news here is, since more and more people will have this issue, given the prevalence of digital capture and storage of images and video, there will be a market for technology tools to make it easy to handle large volumes of archived digital content.

I mirror all of my images across two drives and will be archiving to DVD. It's easy and relatively cheap.

 

[Alex_B]

I have a nagging concern about image archiving. Hard drives have a life span. Every single one will eventually fail.

that is whay you get more than one hard drive. and they should be of different type and different age. RAID does not really help here as it gives no advantage. RAID is meant when you need 24/7 access to you data, e.g. when you operate a file server which is not supposed to be down for a single second. For photo archiving it is too expensive.

disk space is cheap these days. get single external drives. lots of them.

a further advantage is, when you use single drives, you don't have to switch all of them on when you want to retrieve a particular image or shooting from your archive. this also increases the lifespan of your drives. I am doing this sort of archiving with hard drives for almost 10 years now, and never lost a single file. In the beginnign it was much fewer and smaller drives of course I never did rely on any floppy disk, CD or DVD.

i almost filled up my first terabyte of archives ... and it is all backed up on hard drives (3 backup drives each of 300 +XX GBytes, the main drives are 500 + XX GByte drives).