Mo’ Floppies Mo’ Problems
Posted on November 16, 2007
I found a stack of 5 ¼” floppy disks while rifling through some old boxes today. The disks were labeled “Full Backup” and were from early 1991. The capacity of a double-density 5 ¼” floppy disk is about 1.2 MB. Amazing. Today I back up about 10.3 gigabytes, which is small by comparison to people who shoot a lot of digital photos or video. Doing some simple math (1 GB = 1024 MB, and let’s assume the floppy disk was full at 1.2 MB – I’m not going to try and find a 5 ¼” disk drive to check it), my data volume has grown 8,789 times the 1991 amount.
In another useless mathematical exercise, assume that a 5 ¼” floppy disk is 1.5 mm thick and (who would have guessed??) 5 ¼” wide. To hold my current backup set I’d need a stack of floppy disks 43 feet high or 3845 feet (about 3/4 miles) if placed end to end.
Finally, let’s assume that in 1991 it cost $20 for a box of 10 5 ¼” floppy disks (my memory may be way off, but unlike what my girlfriend tells me, I don’t live in the past), so $2 per disk. To store my 10.3 GB on floppies would cost $17,578 ($1,707 per GB). Today you can get a 500 GB hard drive for $100 (20 cents per GB). So buy this ridiculously rough measure, storage has gotten 8,535 times cheaper since then.
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Too funny. Even a small USB drive holds 1000’s times more than the old floppy.
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Remember how cool you thought you were when you first got dual-floppy drives? Yeah, those were the days!
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