J O N A T H A N JK . C O M

I only mention this because I’ve just bought a 500GB laptop hard drive for my MacBook as a second backup drive * (I was waiting for the 7200rpm version but they are taking too long to come out), its going to cost me £102 inc VAT, (for those in the US, take the current 15% VAT off and then roughly by doubling the remaining figure, you’ll get your price).  

Anyway a 1.5TB desktop hard drive at the moment costs £116.  I didn’t realise such a high capacity drive was so cheap, even here in the UK!  Anyway I remember back in 1998 when I wanted to purchase a 3GB desktop hard drive.  Yes you read that right, 3GB!  You can get more formatted space in a mobile phone today!  

The asking price in an issue of MicroMart £150!  How things change, one can only wonder what things will be like in the next 10 years for single disk drives.  In terms of size the difference between 3GB and 1.5TB is 500 times!  Anyway I found this link for those interested which tracks the megabyte to cost ratio all the way back to 1956.  Back then a 5MB drive cost $50,000, thankfully I didn’t live in the 50′s, but its all relative I suppose, somebody is going to look back on this time period in say 50 years and say the same thing!

*As a side note I also bought this Macally enclosure for said drive here. It is a Firewire/USB enclosure but thankfully it has 2 FireWire ports ideal for daisy chaining and ideal because it doesn’t require a power cable either.

*UPDATE

The hard drive and the Macally enclosure arrived today and here is a pic of 820GB’s connected through 1 FireWire cable.  I have 320GB in the Macbook as well.  In the box with the Macally enclosure you also get 2 USB cables (you need to use both of those btw) if you want to power up the enclosure and you can’t daisy chain it as you see here with the FireWire… side note to Apple, why did you remove this kind of functionality from the new Macbooks again?

From one firewire cable.

The 500GB is also performing the Time Machine backups while I’m transfering information over to the 320GB Freecom Toughdrive.