I was a mechanical engineer in the 1980s. I was a quality assurance engineer and a development engineer in the disk drive industry. My first job was at Memorex in Santa Clara, CA. We actually manufactured the drives there. The drive I worked on weighed 70 pounds and had 100 MB of storage. It think the platters were 12-inches in diameter. Maybe they were 10-inches. They were hard to carry around from office to office! We were required to put them on a rolling cart, but we usually ignored that rule because we thought we were cool by pretending they were easy to carry in our arms.
The drive went inside a refrigerator sized frame that contained the cooling system and a bunch of printed circuit boards. I think the frame might have held two drives. It costs tens of thousands of dollars.
So when I see a 3 terabyte drive that weighs a couple of pounds and costs $(removed) $(removed) (Price just increased from $(removed) to $(removed)), I can't help but be amazed. If someone had told me in 1985 that we'd have drives like this in 30 years, I'd have thought they'd been huffing the toluene we used in the metrology lab to degrease parts.
This Western Digital 3 TB drive is on sale now, and is actually cheaper than the same price as the 2 TB model ($(removed)) on Amazon.
