The Future of Computers

[CalLabSolutions]

What is going to happen to drive letters in the future?

I the past you had two folppy drives A: and B: (5.25 and 3.5)  today most labtops do not even come with a folppy drive.  Though I have not purchased a desk top in last decade, I am sure they will no longer come with folppy disks in the near future. 

For the most part floppy disks do not make sense any more.  You can only store 1.44M of data, where thumb drivers are up words of 16G.  That is 2 DVD's of space.

So when do we get our Drive A: and Drive B: back?

[mdbuike]

Never, unless you buy a USB floppy (I did to transfer DOS (yes I know) info for back-ups..formally to my thumb drive, but since ACC and USAF has gotten paranoid, to a non-networked computer.

The unfortunate reality is the military has not upgraded their computer systems/controllers as fast as technology advances.

Ahh well, just a few more years to Social Security     


Mike

[beadwork]

You can purchase a USB external drive for this.

[Hawaii596]

I love my new little Passport drive.  Its a 250GB Western Digital.  I keep it in my laptop case, and store my massive volumes of files on it.  I just plug in onto my work desktop when I want stuff and take it home at night.  About half of our lab staff has their own now.  They're getting really inexpensive.

[Crane-iac]

My storage drive at the house is a 500 gig USB.  My goal is to have 1 Terabyte of storage space on my desktop. . . . why? I have no good answer.  :-D

[Hawaii596]

If its anything like my reasoning, I just like bigger hard drives.  To quote Tim "The Toolman" Taylor, "OO, OO!!"

On the slightly more serious side, file sizes seem to get bigger and bigger.

[dminesinger]

Those big USB drives are great. Unless your on a military or government computer.

Thanks to some one bring in a virus on a USB device at the Pentagon. All USB ports for thumb drives and USB drives were turned off. All Government thumb drives had to be turned in.  Connecting your IPOD to a Military computer is now grounds for displanary action.

And HP and Fluke keeps sending out updates to 1.44 floppies. Try telling IT you have to have one installed in your new computer.

PapaBear

[MRD]

My storage drive at the house is a 500 gig USB.      My goal is to have 1 Terabyte of storage space on my desktop.     .     .     .     why? I have no good answer.     

Or you could just get one of these for the same price a 1 GB hard drive cost in 1995 

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/27/western-digitals-2tb-caviar-green-hard-drive-launches-gets-pre/

(For some reason the insert hyperlink changes the link)  Moderators?  Help?


edit: fixed link
Hoopty

[Broken_Wings]

Go make 4 more posts in the pad your post count thread and try again. If I'm not mistaken Hoopty implemented a 10 post count required before links work to cut back on some spam that showed up before that. So maybe make it 5 more posts then edit it.

[CalLabSolutions]

I am just amazed at how fast we can fill up a computer with data..

Everytime a get a new laptop, I get the biggest drive available..  Thinking I will never fill it up..
Now I have 400G hard drive in my laptop.  Less than 6 months old and only have 80G of free space..

Where does it all go.. 8G is MP3's no video, no games (well one game Civilization IV).. 

I am just amazed I am using 320G of space on my Hard Drives.

[scottbp]

You're not running a HD imaging utility (e.g. Norton Ghost) are you? I have a 500 GB drive that I carved into 200 and 300 GB partitions, and discovered that Ghost ate up most of the 300 GB partition, because it kept piling up images weekly... I deleted 200 GB of old images and left just the latest image (about 27 GB). Now, once again, I have more space than I know what to do with. Deleting the undo files after installing a service pack also helps to free up HD space.