leyton.org

When I was a nipper of a systems administrator, machines with gigabytes of memory were a thing to dream of. A 10Gb disk was the pinnacle of capacity. Something for the arbitrage boys, with their pots of cash and easy life. Not so us poor sods stuck with bureaucracy and form filling. If we could get 512Mb, we’d count ourselves lucky, and a few 5Gb disks would see us through. Going back further still, when I was but a measly student, a 30Mb hard disk was top of the line.

You’ll have to excuse the reminiscing here, because I do find it quite hard to believe I’m carting a 1Gb CompactFlash memory card around in my camera, and have a 500Gb removal disk drive plugged into my computer (well, it’s sat on the living room floor at the moment). Every now and then, I find it’s a huge amount of fun to sit back, and just enjoy being impressed by the sheer wonder of Moore’s law.

Ok, so Moore’s law applies to transistors in a chip, less so to storage, but they’re closely inter-linked of course. Being specific, my first PC (bought in 1989, running MS-DOS 3.30a) was a measly 12Mhz (which was good, as it was an NEC v20, which improved things quite substantially over the 8086 chipset). I’m not sat with a 1.8Ghz PowerPC under the hood here, and as it’s RISC it doesn’t compare directly, but it’s still two orders of magnitude in 15 years.

Anyway, to the point. I’ve recently purchased myself a Nikon D70, which I’m enjoying immensely. It’s a superb piece of kit, which has helped me improve my photography immensely. It’s surprising that not having to worry about film types, and knowing the results can be quickly examined, tweaked and printed off, all helps to encourage experimentation. Also having a place to easily exhibit them and share them with like-minded people is enjoyable. (see my flickr photos and the groups, for example Glasgow).

I’d reused compact flash cards from my previous camera (a Canon Ixus v3, which I still use for snaps and such), so wasn’t getting the ‘latest and greatest’. To be honest, I didn’t actually think there was much distinction. But I was wrong, very wrong.

The Bytestor Hi-Speed 1Gb card is just that, extremely Hi-Speed. A rapid-shoot picture of nothing in particular is almost twice as fast as with my older compact-flash cards. I also need the capacity: I shoot in RAW format, to give the most flexibility with my shots, and previously could only fit 20-30 pictures in this format on my 256Mb card. Now it’s closer to 100. Ok, so with my Belkin compact flash reader attachment on my iPod I’m “limited” to about 15Gb of space (given my 40Gb iPod is now almost 2/3rds full), but when you’re busy taking photographs you don’t want to have to worry about capacity.

The speed is therefore everything they say it is, and so far I’m having a great experience. The amazon review does talk of corruption problems but so far no problem, probably because I formatted it and do so regularly (delete-all takes an age in comparison).

I also recently picked up a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500Gb, and it’s most certainly Big, Disky and extremly large at 500Gb. It sits about 6inches high, and is an inch or two wide, but boy does it have capacity and speed. 7200rpm isn’t exactly the snappiest disk around for sure, but it’s primarily a backup device. I felt it was necessary with the increased size of my photograph collection, MP3 collection, generally important data on my iMac G5, and growing TV recording collection made with my elagato eyeTV. I’m also terrible at committing to delete things, so this gives me more of an excuse.

I’m very happy with the LaCie disk. It’s not the best and most complete backup solution ever - I still want to get a removable storage device to give me an ability to go back over longer periods (plus my friend neil forrester had an older model which died completely, and loose his substantial MP3 collection in the process).

It’s certainly fun to look back at where storage technology was even a few years ago, and marvel that we can take high resolution pictures onto a tiny piece of electronic circuitry and silicon in a split-second. But it’s even more fun to actually be able to both afford it, and enjoy using it. But I can’t help but wonder where we’ll be in another ten years…

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Apple, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.