Less Noise Is Good News

In preparation for moving to a new home I’ve been going through my stash of surplus motherboards, hard drives, etc., and getting them ready to donate to the local community college district. This finally caused me to look into disk-scrubbing software, since I don’t want to release drives that may have confidential information on them.

The scrubbing exercise has reminded me of a few things I’d completely forgotten about:

  • I am so glad the industry moved to the SATA interface from PATA. Those !@#$!@#$#@ forty pin EIDE connectors, and power connectors, are a pain in the butt to remove.
  • It’s laughable how much storage capacities have grown. None of the scrubbed drives are more than eight or so years old, but the earliest ones stored only 6 gigabytes of data. I just built a NAS4Free file server around four 3 terabyte (3,000 gigabyte!) drives, each of which has 500x the capacity of those old drives…in the same volume. For the same cost. In nominal dollars. Wow!
  • Those old drives were noisy. Work environments must have been a lot louder back in the day. Yet I don’t remember that.

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