Hard Drive Size: A RETROspective

Sometimes, when I write a blog post for this site, I am reminded of how self-centered and self-serving some blog posts can be, including mine. In my opinion, for a blog to be useful for others, posts should generally benefit others with information, advice, or humor. Granted, one's introspective catharsis may prove therapeutic for others. Anyway, this blog is not necessarily therapeutic and it may not benefit most people, but it does accomplish one thing: it spreads the word about things that many of us have consigned to obsolescence. For example, obviously, old videogames are still relevant and fun for many reasons: pretty and cartoonish colors, intriguing mascots, and a pick-up-and-play aspect that makes those classic games so much more accessible for kids and adults alike than modern games that need a 10-button, two analog-stick, and one D-pad controller. Another thing people have dubbed as "useless" because of age are audio cassettes. Yes, the sound that one gets from a tape recording is certainly not high-fidelity compared to CDs, but cassettes are portable, rather durable, and accomplish the simple task of allowing for playback. A third item to consider are hard drives and storage media.

Here's a link to an Epinions article I wrote three years ago about hard drive size and how many of us are seduced into buying a new laptop, music player, or media card only because its data storage space is greater than the perfectly useful item we possess:

Don't Be Seduced By Drive Size

To summarize, we tend to do away with items that still work because the storage space is relatively small. Who hasn't thrown aside a good 1 gigabyte (GB) MP3 player to get a snazzy 4 GB player? One exception is hard drive size for storing photo files, which can get massive with 12-24 megabytes per file; for these files, larger hard drives (especially for photographers) make sense. In any case, storage size, though an important factor for some users, is often overemphasized. Because most of us are too occupied with storage size, we tend to throw away items that are still functional, like those old 10 GB hard drives from days of yore.