Older Hard Drives

[Appleboy45]

I was randomly looking at some old WD hard drives from about 2003. I am curious, does anyone know what a 250GB hard drive back in 2003 would be like in relationship in 2018 (Ex. A 250GB hard drive in 2003 is like having a 10TB hard drive today in 2018)? Also, does anyone know how much a brand new 250GB hard drive would have cost in 2003?

 

In case anyone is wondering, I really have no good or useful reason for asking this, other than my fascination for storage media (Yes, that is a thing), and curiosity.

[NelizMastr]

In 2003 250GB was monumental. Typically servers had 36GB disks in them, for reference, 72GB for the more high end stuff. The typical PC would have had something between 20 and 80GB usually. I'd say it was very much like the 10TB disks are today.

 

As far as the cost goes, you can find that out by using the internet archive and browsing websites that advertised them. 2003 is new enough for web shops to exist. Don't forget to adjust for inflation.

[Appleboy45]

2 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

In 2003 250GB was monumental. Typically servers had 36GB disks in them, for reference, 72GB for the more high end stuff. The typical PC would have had something between 20 and 80GB usually. I'd say it was very much like the 10TB disks are today.

 

As far as the cost goes, you can find that out by using the internet archive and browsing websites that advertised them. 2003 is new enough for web shops to exist. Don't forget to adjust for inflation.

I've actually been looking around the Internet Archive. I noticed that about enterprise drives when looking at WD's website from 2003. And it seems they only had a 36GB enterprise drive (WD Raptor). 

 

I found the Raptor in the products tab on this page. On this page, this was the drive I was looking at (250GB Caviar SE). Seems to be the best consumer hard drive you could have gotten at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/20030605151727/http://www.wdc.com:80/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=42

[porina]

I can't check the date until I get home, but I still have WD 250 and 320GB HDs bought when they were current and affordable. No idea what they cost, other than they were affordable to me at the time. I will say, there is a HUGE difference in performance between a 250GB drive of the day then, and a 250GB drive of recent times. I can't believe but I think they still made them up to recently, as they get included with low end equipment.

[Appleboy45]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

I can't check the date until I get home, but I still have WD 250 and 320GB HDs bought when they were current and affordable. No idea what they cost, other than they were affordable to me at the time. I will say, there is a HUGE difference in performance between a 250GB drive of the day then, and a 250GB drive of recent times. I can't believe but I think they still made them up to recently, as they get included with low end equipment.

I don't know about the rest of the HDDs, but WD does still indeed make a 250GB WD Black drive. Not exactly sure why the still sell it. I guess it could be for low end equipment like you said, but I figured that would be more for a WD Blue over a Black. However, you can still get a 320GB Blue. (Note the 250GB Black and 320GB are both 2.5-inch drives).

 

I've been toying around with a Dell Dimension 8200 with a WD Caviar SE 250GB hard drive from 2007 (I think it is the WD2500JB), and it definitely is slow compared to modern hard drives. However, the drive is also has the IDE interface so I don't know how much of a difference that makes. The drive has 8MBs of cache. Back in the early 2000s, it's funny how much WD seems to have talked about 8MBs of cache being the "secret" to fast performance.

[Spotty]

31 minutes ago, Appleboy45 said:

I was randomly looking at some old WD hard drives from about 2003. I am curious, does anyone know what a 250GB hard drive back in 2003 would be like in relationship in 2018 (Ex. A 250GB hard drive in 2003 is like having a 10TB hard drive today in 2018)? Also, does anyone know how much a brand new 250GB hard drive would have cost in 2003?

When I bought a PC in 2003 it came with an 80GB HDD. Still have the 80GB HDD from 2003 and it still works AFAIK.
I remember having an 80GB drive at the time was a huge epeen thing as all of my school friends had only 20-40GB drives. I can only estimate looking back on the period, but I'd say that 40GB drive would be the typical for around that time, so 40GB = 1TB, 80GB = 2TB, 120GB = 3TB. So following that I'd say 250GB of that time would have been like a 6TB or 8TB in modern standards. 250GB would have been a pretty decent sized drive for the time.

Hard drive capacities and cost improved considerably in the 2000s. It quickly went 40GB, 80GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB. Then there were problems with some of the manufacturing plants in 2011 where a lot of the major manufacturers were flooded due to a tsunami, and costs shot up and advancements stagnated for a few years while they recovered. Only really started to see some more advancements in the last few years with WD and Seagates newer high capacity drives.

[Appleboy45]

2 minutes ago, Spotty said:

When I bought a PC in 2003 it came with an 80GB HDD. Still have the 80GB HDD from 2003 and it still works AFAIK.
I remember having an 80GB drive at the time was a huge epeen thing as all of my school friends had only 20-40GB drives. I can only estimate looking back on the period, but I'd say that 40GB drive would be the typical for around that time, so 40GB = 1TB, 80GB = 2TB, 120GB = 3TB. So following that I'd say 250GB of that time would have been like a 6TB or 8TB in modern standards. 250GB would have been a pretty decent sized drive for the time.

Hard drive capacities and cost improved considerably in the 2000s. It quickly went 40GB, 80GB, 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB. Then there were problems with some of the manufacturing plants in 2011 where a lot of the major manufacturers were flooded due to a tsunami, and costs shot up and advancements stagnated for a few years while they recovered. Only really started to see some more advancements in the last few years with WD and Seagates newer high capacity drives.

Never knew there were tsunamis that affected these companies. I wonder if that what caused a bunch of companies to buy other companies (WD bought HGST, Seagate bought Samsung, etc.)

 

My first computer, a Dell Dimension XPS T500 from 1999 originally came with a 6.4GB WD hard drive. The drive still works today, but in CrystalDiskInfo shows bad sectors. The computer was a hand me down from my dad, so in 2002 (At least that is what is said on the drive, I can't guaranteed it was installed in 2002), he installed a WD Caviar 80GB hard drive. The drive still kinda works, but it's failing S.M.A.R.T. (Read error rate goes under the threshold, and fails WD's own utilities). I quickly made backups and I'm hoping I got most of the data off the drive. At this point, the drive just shows bad sectors, but I don't trust it anymore. My uncle who gave me the Dimension 8200 had the same model hard drive fail on him.

[Spotty]

10 minutes ago, Appleboy45 said:

Never knew there were tsunamis that affected these companies. I wonder if that what caused a bunch of companies to buy other companies (WD bought HGST, Seagate bought Samsung, etc.)

It was a huge thing at the time. Almost overnight HDD prices doubled in cost. Everyone in the PC building community was complaining about the pricing of HDDs, similar to what we have now with RAM and graphic cards. It took a few years for costs to come back down to what they were prior to the flooding.

Here's a wikipedia page for it if you're interested. Since you mentioned you had an interest in storage related things it might interest you if you wanted to do a bit more research in to it.

Quote

On 8 October 2011 the 10-metre high water barrier in Nikom Rojna Industrial Estate, which housed many manufacturing plants, collapsed.^[20] The strong current interfered with reconstruction efforts and resulted in the area being non-operational. One of the major manufacturing plants, Honda, was left virtually inaccessible.^[74]

Thailand is the world's second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world's production.^[75]Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital's, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives.^[76][77] Western Digital was able to get one of their plants, flooded on 15 October 2011, restored and operating on 30 November 2011. Western Digital's flood-related costs were estimated at between US$225–275 million, however, an insurance claim of US$50 million for property damage, and another claim for business interruption would help lower the net impact.^[78]As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.^[76][79]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods#Damages_to_industrial_estates_and_global_supply_shortages

[Appleboy45]

9 minutes ago, Spotty said:

It was a huge thing at the time. Almost overnight HDD prices doubled in cost. Everyone in the PC building community was complaining about the pricing of HDDs, similar to what we have now with RAM and graphic cards. It took a few years for costs to come back down to what they were prior to the flooding.

Here's a wikipedia page for it if you're interested. Since you mentioned you had an interest in storage related things it might interest you if you wanted to do a bit more research in to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods#Damages_to_industrial_estates_and_global_supply_shortages

Dang, that sounded rough having something so large and important being flooded out. Glad storage media wasn't relevant to me at the time (I was 8 at the time). As of lately I've been buying up a bunch of drives since I'm always needing to find ways to make backups (Which in the past I didn't really take seriously, I almost had two disasters because I didn't take back up seriously) and expand.