I bought Steve Gibson’s SpinRite HD test/restore utility in the late 90’s. Recently got an email saying I could get the latest version for free. Started running the most intensive testing on a 1 TB drive. It estimated 2 weeks!
@aceplace57 , if the flash drives you are finding are not good enough, or marginal, I suggest trying an NVMe drive instead, in an appropriate enclosure; that will do the trick. None of this 60 MB/s; we are talking more like reading and writing at a gigabyte per second.
The people “reminiscing” about how their hard drive capacity was not big enough in 1952, or whatever, are perhaps revealing something about their age, but that information will not help you stream high-bandwidth, high-resolution A/V to portable solid-state recording media today.
Your 1 TB hard drive’s firmware implements a number of diagnostic self-tests, and it definitely does not take “2 weeks”. Sounds like the software you got was worth what you paid for it. Or, more likely, there was some sort of misunderstanding, because SpinRite is not supposed to take that long.
Decent bet the prof was referring to the price of what we now call RAM, not permanent random access mass storage = current terminology disk, flash, SSD, etc.
The price of both of those things is now many orders of magnitude below 1 cent per bit. But the two prices are also still a few orders of manitude apart.
The price of RAM today is a lot less than a penny a bit also, of course. Memory hierarchies were a lot different back then. The next year when I went to grad school each of us in our group got our own hard disk which we put into the drier sized disk drive. Not used for cache. When you mounted a disk drive, you physically mounted a disk drive!
My laptop has 32 GB of RAM installed, or 256 Gbits. I don’t know how much of the price the RAM was, call it $200 to be very generous, so 20,000 cents.. So that’s less than a a tenth of a million cents a bit.
The stubby (dongle) flash drives are great for plugging into a TV’s USB. My Vizio tv plays movies or audio from USB. It’s great when our internet is down.
The stubby is safer in case the tv gets moved too close to the wall.
It was very rare for a home pc user to have a hard drive before 1988. They were too expensive.
5 1/2" Floppy disks were the the norm.
It was different at corporate jobs.
I still remember the excitement when 3 1/4 became available with more storage.
My dept’s boss had a Word Processor with 8" floppys. I never used those. I remember seeing them in his office. I think that software was from the early 80’s. That was six to seven years before I got into data processing.
I’m a 90s kid so I remember USBs but only as a relic, CDs were king when I was a kid.
I think I took a PowerPoint presentation about the Maya or about camels to school on a floppy disk in 2nd grade but that’s about it for practical usage.
I remember when a 16GB flash drive cost $39 but, with the blossoming of huge amounts of cloud storage, they are dirt cheap. I keep a bag of ten 32GB drives in my desk. I think they cost something like $19. That’s $2 a piece! LOL
IMO the historical question before us is not what hard drives cost in 1985, it is when it began to make more sense to use flash storage for music production as opposed to HDDs and digital or analogue tape. Those in the biz probably have specific experiences in the matter. I see that right now a Pyramix system comes with a 1 or 2 TB M.2 SSD.
My Mac II had a 20MB hard drive in 1987, but it was a beast of a machine. I added an additional hard drive soon after I got it - the hard drive price wars were in full swing, and I bought a Conner 40MB drive for $400.