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What Gets Bigger as It Gets Smaller? The Hard Drive

2004.02.27

I've still got an old external SCSI hard drive that was bought from Power Max a number of years ago. It's worked well with my beige G3 tower -- and several other machines before it. This was a great hard drive for storing data, but it wasn't especially fast if you decided to boot off of it or run applications from it.

The drive itself is a full-height 3.5" hard drive, which is three times the height of the hard drives that ship with most modern machines. Some people might even remember 5.25" full height hard drives that cost thousands or the external hard drives (usually 5.25" half height) that often sat under a Mac Plus. For about $1,000 you could get a 30 MB drive.

These days a movie trailer wouldn't even fit on there. It might be able to hold one album of MP3 files, if that.

That 30 MB drive also most likely wouldn't fit inside a new Power Mac, much less function correctly (though if you added a SCSI card, it could work). Considering that these days 30 GB is considered small, there wouldn't be much reason to install an old 30 MB drive in a G-series Mac anyway.

Nowadays the typical hard drives inside desktop computers are 3.5", half or 1/3 height. Notebook drives are even smaller, 2.5"!

How about the tiny little hard drives in the iPods? The ones in the first iPods aren't much bigger than the battery! I thought squeezing 5 GB into a device of that size was amazing….

The new iPod Mini however, represents a change from the more typical hard drive formats. The mini uses a Compact Flash size device, the 4 GB Hitachi MicroDrive. Interestingly enough, this drive retails for $479.95, so if you buy an iPod Mini and tear it apart for the drive, you can save money. (Why would you want to take apart a $250 iPod Mini when you can do the same to less expensive Creative MuVo MP3 player, I don't know)

Technology's really come down in size in the past few years. The 4 GB SCSI drive I have probably dates from about 1997. While it wasn't exactly the latest in terms of technology for 1997, it wasn't necessarily outdated, either, given that 4 GB drives were shipping with beige G3s.

Since the MicroDrive is the same size as a standard Compact Flash card, today you can have 4 GB of storage space in a digital camera. This, of course, allows for more pictures at higher resolutions. Switching Compact Flash cards would become a thing of the past. [Editor's note: There are 4 GB Compact Flash cards -- but at $1,500, who can afford them?]

The question that still exists, though, is how much smaller can hard drives get? A few years ago I probably would've said that a 2.5" notebook hard drive was about the smallest that could be made. Since we've seen that is clearly not the case, I have little doubt that we'll continue to see even smaller drives.

Eventually, though, it'll get to a point where the drive can no longer be made physically smaller. Perhaps we'll then turn to types of memory for storage. In fact, some of the old 286 and earlier laptop computers used a special type of memory as a drive.

The Outbound Laptop, a Mac clone, also came with a built in RAM disk. It's clear that memory can be used as storage; it's just a matter of time before we see the hard drive becoming a thing of the past.

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