Hard Drive Technology

Years ago I was always on the bleeding edge of technology. I had dual processor computers years before the Core Duo became standard, I used to overclock my processors to squeeze every bit of processing power I could out of them and I spent a lot of money in the process trying to keep up with technology.  I typically built myself at least three new computers each year with the latest and greatest parts. These days I can honestly say I don’t run any applications that need more than middle of the line processors and memory. I am very content running a year or two behind the times. Every now and then one of my older machines has an issue and I have to replace something like a power supply or a hard drive which is what led me to write this post. I cannot believe how far technology has come in such a short time and how low the prices have become.  I just had an older Maxtor 320 GB hard drive start to act up and I prudently replaced it before it had the chance to seize up and vaporized my data. Browsing the shelves of the local Staples I found a One Terra-byte hard drive for $119.00. $119.00 for a 1 TB Drive??? Five years ago I would have expected to pay $1900 for a 1TB drive.  The funny thing is that this is nowhere near the top of the line or the largest drive on the market these days.  1 TB is now just a run of the mill size storage device.  In 2000 I remember saying something foolish like “Why would anyone ever need anything larger than an 80GB hard drive?” My, how times have changed.