Taking storage for granted and 'The Importance Of Backups' part 362

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In which I muse on the advances made in storage technology over the last 25 years, acknowledge some imperfections and then repeat the oldest piece of 'good advice' in the IT world . Do you know how they get 50,000,000,000 1s and 0s on your microSD? No, I don't either, and I don't trust it.

"Yes, yes, you've heard plenty of old timers talk about the early days in the computer world, but bear with me. When I started out in the Aerospace business (1983), the hard disks used by our minicomputers were of the order of 10MB, they required an air-conditioned room, they weighed several kilogrammes, made an absolute racket and cost a fortune.

Contrast that to today, with hundreds of Megabytes being given away as freebies by newspapers and at conferences, with 8GB (i.e. 8000MB) now available in microSD form, on a solid state sliver of silicon that I can barely see and that weighs around a gramme.

So let's get this straight. In 25 years, I've seen capacity go up by roughly 1000 times while disk mass/volume has gone down by around 1000 times. So around a million times more efficient, then." 

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