# What You Can Learn From Old Hard Drive Adverts

DevFeed: [What You Can Learn From Old Hard Drive Adverts](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/what-you-can-learn-from-old-hard-drive-adverts-12505.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://brooker.co.za/blog/2021/03/25/latency-bandwidth.html>)

Author: Marc Brooker

Published: 2021-03-25T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog.md>), [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog-2.md>)

Topics: [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [IO](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/io.md>)

Tags: [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [hdd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hdd.md>), [io](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/io.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [ssd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ssd.md>), [storage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/storage.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines how storage technology has improved over time, showing that capacity and bandwidth have grown much faster than latency. Comparing old hard drives, modern hard drives, and SSDs, it explains why random I/O remains increasingly costly despite major hardware advances.

## Source excerpt

What You Can Learn From Old Hard Drive Adverts The single most important trend in systems. Adverts for old computer hardware, especially hard drives, are a fun staple of computer forums and the nerdier side of the internet1. For example, a couple days ago, Glenn Lockwood tweeted out this old ad: At least this isn't an ad for a HAMR drive. $10k in today's dollars. pic.twitter.com/2h2g3Gnguw -- Glenn K. Lockwood (@glennklockwood) March 24, 2021 Apparently from the early '80s, these drives offered seek times of 70ms, access speeds of about 900kB/s, and capacities up to 10MB. Laughable, right? But these same ads hide a really important trend that's informed system design more than any other. To understand what's going on, let's compare this creaky old 10MB drive to a modern competitor. Most consumers don't buy magnetic drives anymore, so we'll throw in an SSD for good measure. XCOMP 10MB Modern HDD Change Modern SSD Change Capacity 10MB 18TiB 1.8 million times 2 TiB 200,000x Latency 70ms 5ms 14x 50μs 1400x Throughput 900kB/s 220MB/s 250x 3000MB/s 3300x IOPS/GiB (QD1) 1400 0.01 0.00007x 10 0.007x Or there abouts2. Starting with the magnetic disk, we've made HUGE gains in storage size, big gains in throughput, modest gains in latency, and a seen a massive drop in random IO per unit of storage. What may be surprising to you is that SSDs, despite being much faster in every department, have seen pretty much the same overall trend. This is not, by any stretch, a new observation. 15 years ago the great Jim Gray said "Disk is Tape". David Patterson (you know, Turing award winner, RISC co-inventor, etc) wrote a great paper back in 2004 titled Latency Lags Bandwidth that made the same observation. He wrote: I am struck by a consistent theme across many technologies: bandwidth improves much more quickly than latency. and In the time that bandwidth doubles, latency improves by no more than a factor of 1.2 to 1.4. That may not sound like a huge amount, but remember that we're talking