I thought I'd just share how amazed I am at the cost of hard disks these days. Rather, I should say I'm surprised at the lack of a cost. For a hard disk over about 100 GB, you now pay less than $1 per gigabyte. I think it will call into question certain assumptions about the viability of hard disks as a backup medium.
Despite this amazing breakthrough, the 160 GB disk I purchased unfortunately can't be used to its maximum capacity with my ancient (2001) motherboard. This is due to the 28-bit limitation on physical addressing in the old ATA standard. Luckily a new standard has come out in the past year, but I'm yet to try the necessary BIOS and Windows upgrade.
In a related matter, look out for a post coming soon on sustainable storage of digital information. You might want to syndicate this page.
