External hard drive
Mar 9, 2019 17:04:16 #
wrangler5
Loc: Missouri
D-Train wrote:
< snip > Heck, just this morning I was looking at external drives on Amazon and they have an 8TB drive for only $139. That's astonishing. I spent way more than that for a 20MB (yes, Megabytes) hard drive back in 1990. Talk about cheap storage! 
When I had my first IBM PC XT clone built, so long ago I can't quite remember when - it ran Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flight Simulator just fine, so that confirmed it was a good clone - I think I paid $500 extra to go from the "standard" 10MB hard drive to 20MB. Nobody was ever going to need that much storage, but I wanted to be sure I didn't run out of space.
I think they call those the good old days. But I'm not so sure. (My mortgage rate was over 9% and was considered a bargain.)
Mar 9, 2019 17:15:17 #
TriX wrote:
I’m with you on those backups and DR copies, but that “cheap” 8TB/$139 storage is worth just what you pay for it - keep up with those backups, or buy two and mirror them (RAID 1).
Yes. My 2Tb WD Gold drive was $125.
Mar 9, 2019 18:09:35 #
Longshadow wrote:
Yes. My 2Tb WD Gold drive was $125.
Yep, Enterprise/data center class drives are definitely worth the $. Since WD bought HGST, the HGST UltraStar DC drive is replacing the WD Gold is their enterprise class drive. HGST makes excellent drives and the Ultrastar DC would be my choice if I were buying HDs.
Mar 10, 2019 14:12:12 #
wrangler5 wrote:
When I had my first IBM PC XT clone built, so long... (show quote)
Those were modern days for me. Lotus 123 was a Windows Application. My first PC ran MS-DOS 5 (there was no such thing as Windows back then) and they came with 640KB of RAM. If you had 1MB of RAM you needed to add some lines in your config.sys and autoexec.bat files to use the memory above 640KB as either extended or expanded RAM. This was around 1989, right when I got out of the Navy.
To stay on a photography theme here, back then I had a Canon A-1. This was a big upgrade for me from the AE-1 that got stolen from me on a beach in San Diego where I was going to school after getting out of boot camp. I loved that camera. Since then I've had a lot of DSLR's. The first of which was a Sony Mavica that wrote to 3.5" Floppy Disks. LOL!
Mar 10, 2019 14:24:04 #
D-Train wrote:
Those were modern days for me. Lotus 123 was a Win... (show quote)
I had an AE-1 and a Mavica also! For the Mavica, I got the adapter "disk" that took a memory stick.
(I definitely remember DOS 3.2, possibly 2.x also.)
Mar 10, 2019 14:36:58 #
wrangler5
Loc: Missouri
D-Train wrote:
Those were modern days for me. Lotus 123 was a Windows Application. < snip >
Both 123 and Flight Simulator were DOS programs first.
Mar 10, 2019 14:48:15 #
Yep, those were the days of writing “tight” code and becoming adept, as you mention, of editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to load drivers, etc. into “high” memory (above 640K) so that you had the max available space to run aps in the lower 640K. I just sold my two AE-1P bodies last year, but kept my F1n.
Mar 10, 2019 15:09:46 #
wrangler5 wrote:
Both 123 and Flight Simulator were DOS programs first.
I stand corrected. I guess my memory is not what it used to be. The future is not what it used to be either. LOL!
Mar 10, 2019 15:36:26 #
TriX wrote:
Yep, those were the days of writing “tight” code and becoming adept, as you mention, of editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to load drivers, etc. into “high” memory (above 640K) so that you had the max available space to run aps in the lower 640K.
....
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Definitely, as little code as possible. To this day I hate verbose code. (I won't touch Front Page or an HTML file created by Word.) Then program developers went nuts with code once the memory barrier was broken.
I coded minimally. I built a dBase IV (DOS) application for the Metrology Dept at work. The manager knew some dBase, so he wanted to tweak it some. He wound up making a comment to someone, that stated "Don't touch what code Bill put in, if it's there it needs to be there!"
Mar 10, 2019 15:39:32 #
Mar 13, 2019 14:24:28 #
Cheese wrote:
In a recent post someone mentioned that in order to save wear-and-tear on an external hard drive, the drive should be turned off when not in use. I use the external drive to do an automatic backup at 2am every day which only takes about 10 minutes. Since the drive remains idle for more than 23 hours per day, should it be switched off (by unplugging the USB connection) when not in use? How many of you unplug external hard drives when not in use?
I really don't know which is better, I personally only plug in any of my drives, when I plan on using them!
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