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I have an 80mb hard disk, neevr used, which I bought on Amibench 11 years ago. My plan was to get Shapeshifter working so I could play the Mac version of Broken Sword on my A1200T, but I never got around to it.
I have a 1TB drive which I got brand new for £50 off eBay last year, which I store the backup copies of all our photo's on (as well as dvdr's and online with adrive).
Amazing, 3 years since this thread started and I'm saying I bought a 1TB drive brand new for £50. Technology, eh?
HDD prices sure do keep dropping quickly. And now the 3TB drives are available, 2TB and smaller drives are really starting to drop.
The largest HDDs I've got are 2TB Samsung Spinpoint drives. Very quiet, and very fast. The eco green 5200RPM specs are quite misleading on them because their technology doesn't make them appear any slower that F1 7200 drives.
The smallest drive I've still got is actually smaller than I mentioned in the original post. 120MB 3.5" IDE drive that originally came with my A4000 when it was new. since I've had the A4000 it was replaced straight way with a 1.3GB drive and has sat in a box ever since not doing much. I actually had it back when we started this thread, but had forgotten all about it until I came across it recently.
I've since sold the Archos 330MB drive I originally mentioned. Sold to a collector in German for £60. :)
Looking back, the smallest Hard drive I had was my 40MB System 2000 for my Amiga A500 (I still have the photocopy of the hard drive defect criteria sheet - dated 08 November 1988, inspected by Miniscribe).
And the largest is the 1TB i have in the new computer system.
Still have my original 20mb 2.5" HDD that I bought second hand for my A1200. I could not believe what a change having one made! Had my whole OS, DPaint, Brilliance, Imagine, wordsworth, A couple of games and deliplayer installed. Everything powerpacked to make more room ;)
I also remember how amazed I was at the difference a HDD made to my A1200. I hadn't realised quite how much it would be before I owned one, but once I did there was no going back. The speed of booting into Workbench and loading software blew me away. And no more disk swapping or waiting minutes for something to load was great at the time.
Before the Amiga I had an Atari ST and looked at the HDs you could get for them. At the time they were huge boxed the size of a mega ST that sat under your monitor and provided 10MB or 20MB of storage space. They didn't make a whole lot of sense on the ST due to its very limited GEM desktop that could not really be customised, so I couldn't see the point. HDs on the ST make more sense now, with newer TOS and GEM versions being more customisable, and newer software taking advantage, plus the custom OSs on offer, but back in the day it wasn't so.
My biggest HD is now a 500GB SATA drive.
Smallest is still the 50MB Quantum drive for the A500. Even in 2006 when I got it (second hand), it was really nice to have everything running off one fast HD.
It is hard to imagine we once used computers without harddrives, with the need to load each program separately as we needed them. Productivity was really hampered badly before they became affordable, however the Amiga did combat this to some extent with its ability to multitasking allowing more than one program to be in memory and running side by side at the same time. Still highlights just how innovative it was.
My biggest is a 2TB samsung ecogreen which I was using for media streaming, but then I had to have the big PC switched on. So I bought a 1TB NAS, which is probably the neatest.
Smallest - the Revo only has a 160GB HDD but it's only going to have the OS and a few programs installed, with probably very little actual data.
Other than that... a 20GB ipod or my wife's 5GB Zen mini.