How big was your 1st hard drive...

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Chaotic42

Lifer
Jun 15, 2001
34,988
2,149
126
Originally posted by: j00fek
540MB :D

Same here.

I was way, way behind the times in the 90s. In 1995 I went from a 4.77MHz 8088 with no hard drive to a 60MHz Pentium. The change was dramatic to say the least.
 

corkyg

Elite Member | Peripherals
Super Moderator
Mar 4, 2000
27,370
240
106
A 10 MB Hardcard. Soon followed by a whopping 20 MB Hardcard. Times do change.
 

Baked

Lifer
Dec 28, 2004
36,052
17
81
I don't remember... 50MB? I think it was something I bought from Radio Shack or something.
 

HyunYu

Member
Sep 26, 2003
49
0
0
20MB in my 8088 PC-XT. I was so thrilled that I didn't have to swap out WordPerfect 5.1 in various 360K 5.25" floppies to run the program...

Now at home, altogether in 5 computers, I have over 2.6TB (I do a lot of digital photography and video editing)... that'd be a 136,300x fold increase in capacity over the original drive.
 

Spikesoldier

Diamond Member
Oct 15, 2001
6,766
0
0
first hd i ever bought with my own money and not included in a prebuilt pc was a retail maxtor 30gb drive.
 

Operandi

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,508
0
0
First drive I ever used was a 1.2gb but it was really mine.

The first drive I could call my own (allowance money) was 8gb; a Maxtor I think.
 

Noema

Platinum Member
Feb 15, 2005
2,974
0
0
My first HDD was a 40MB one which came with my 386SX Acer, circa 1992. It was small even for it's time, and after installing Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.2, less than 20MB were available on the drive.

A couple of months later I upgraded it to a 500MB HDD. It was huge for its time. I remember thinking that I would never be able to fill it up! Eventually I did of course but that HDD holds a special place in my heart, since it was the first computer upgrade I did all by myself.
 

Noema

Platinum Member
Feb 15, 2005
2,974
0
0
Originally posted by: Jeff7181
40 megabyte Seagate drive in a 386SX 16MHz with 2 MB of RAM... we used a compression program to double the space... what was it called... DriveSpace I believe.


Actually it was called Doublespace :) Drivespace was the Windows 95 version that came with that OS some years later.

I used it too. Man, did it make my computer slow :D
 

tribbles

Member
Jan 25, 2005
61
0
0
I had a Mac LC. Two of them, in fact, both with 20 MB hard drives. They still worked fine when I gave them away a couple of years ago.

I think my Mac IIsi had a 40 MB hard drive. My Quadra 840A/V had a whopping 1 gigabyte hard drive. In 1993, that was huge.
 

wamasters

Member
Jun 30, 2006
26
0
0
'Gotta prefer the Timex Sinclair comment. My computing experience also pre-dates the hard drive (as a common component in personal computers). Want old? How about MS-DOS on a non-IBM compatable 8 inch floppy based system?
 

compudog

Diamond Member
Apr 25, 2001
5,782
0
71
My first was a Seagate MFM/RLL 10 MB in an IBM PC/XT 8088 @ 4.77 MHz. That was a LONG time ago. Green phosphor display. Sometime back in 1983 or '84.

 

MrUniq

Senior member
Mar 26, 2006
307
0
0
I think I had a 486 that had a 120 MB drive in it. I remember when I first saw a 1 Gig drive on a library PC..me and my friends thought it was crazy to have that much space. But I belive an old Tandy TRS80 had 64K of storage...memory actually.
 

Conky

Lifer
May 9, 2001
10,709
0
0
The first one I can remember, although there were ones before it, was a 20mb drive. When it broke I replaced it with a "jumbo" 40mb unit, lol. It was super expensive too. :p

Now I have roughly half a TB over 4 drives. I got my eye on a 750 gigger though to replace all those older, smaller drives, heh.
 

Engineer

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
39,230
701
126
You only paid $200 in 1984? I paid $379 for a 20 meg drive in 1987. MFM drive that was had an interleve of 4 to 1 (took 4 spins to read a track).

Seagate.
 

Brian48

Diamond Member
Oct 15, 1999
3,410
0
0
Maxtor 4.2g ATA33

Excluding my laptop, it was my first home-built as well as a my first PC.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I believe these were the speces:

Win95 OSR2
Tyan MB
32mb Samsung PC66
P200MMX (o/c'd to 233mhz)
ATI All-in-Wonder (4mb PCI, Rage II)
Guillemot 3dfx Voodoo I (4mb PCI)
Motorola Surf 56k modem (ISA)
Creative AWE32 value (ISA)
Toshiba CDROM

Ah, the days of innocence...............