by My first job in the IT sector was as Technical Support Engineer at Eurologic Systems, an Irish-owned data storage company, back in 1992. I can still recall working with a SEAGATE ST512N (a 5.25″ hard disk with a whopping 12MB capacity) and later on taking delivery of our very first 3.5″ 1GB hard disk (the now famous SEAGATE Barracuda).
However, I also recall some of the former Mentec/DEC guys lamenting about how they used to clean some 300MB DEC drives (one platter at a time) that took up most of the room (way before my time of course).
And so earlier this week, almost 20 years later, I read with interest about Oracle and Sun’s new third-generation storage appliance (based on their 128-bit ZFS file system) which once again takes the form of a huge cabinet-like disk drive that looks like it would easily take up an entire room (ok, the rooms are much bigger now too but you get the point).
Of course the 20-year time gap isn’t the only difference as the new Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliance boasts a staggering raw capacity of 1.15PB (that’s 1,234,799,616 MB) along with a host of other equally impressive numbers.
This enormous growth in storage capacity easily trumps Moore’s Law (CPU capacity doubles every 18 months) and is more like a three-fold increase every 12 months. Nice ….. very nice!