h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

7 months on, and you should be changing "Go out and buy a Zip drive" to "Go out and buy a USB thumb-drive". These little devices have become ubiquitous in the last six months, with a 128MB model now cheaper than a 100MB Zip drive. (I have a 64MB model in my wristwatch!) Anything that needs more than 128MB of storage, or is being kept as a long-term backup should be burnt onto a cheap CD blank - I currently (March 2004) pay about 14p for a blank CD, as opposed to over £6 for a Zip disk.

bring on the future, its 2008 and we got all sorts of new things, solid state hard drives (no moving parts) USB sticks that are 16gigs in size, dual and quad core cpu's, SLI and crossfire, where will it end????

oh and did i forget to mention the terabyte hard drive?? yes!!! 1000gigs of storage all in one drive

My pc has enough power to make a warp drive hahahha

And ZIP disks have gone *up* in price! I looked them up in a catalogue last week (long story) and they've gone up to £10.99 + VAT each!

I bought myself a 16GB thumb drive about a month ago. I find it astonishing that this tiny thing is four times the size (in gigs) of the hard drive on the PC that the wife owned when we got married (1999), which was a pretty decent PC for the time.

I also bought my first TB drive It might well be my last, because by the time I've filled it up (probably before the end of the year - no, I'm not kidding) I'll be able to buy a 1.5 or a 2TB drive. Four of those in a mid tower with RAID 5 and I'll have around 6TB of storage

Just astonishing.

Oh, and the TB drive itself was a fraction of the cost of that 1999 PC

Indeed. I built a computer about a fortnight ago, and spent about £32 on a half-Terabyte drive. That's cheaper than three 100MB ZIP disks.

You got a 500 gig drive for 32 nicker? Mind you, I saw a 300 on sale for a little over $30 last week (Hitachi I think). It seems like not much more than a year ago we were thinking that you shouldn't pay more than a dollar a gig for storage. Then it was 50c a gig. I think my TB drive cost me 25c a gig. And now it's heading towards a mere 10c.

I'm currently buying the bits and pieces to build a PC (can't afford the whole thing at once so I'm doing it monthly - a case here, a CPU there). What do you reckon is a good size these days for a system (C drive, assuming that you're going to be storing all your data elsewhere? I have a handful of drives hanging around you see, drives that I've been using for data storage in external enclosures. All the files that were on those are now on the TB drive, and I'll probably buy another TB for backup. If I could use one of those for my system drive I wouldn't need to buy one just for that purpose, but the biggest is only 180GB (*only* 180 gig ). I'll probably be booting Vista and Ubuntu.

Dang those smiley codes. I meant C: of course.

For a Linux drive, I'd set up a 30 Gig partition as "/" and as big a drive as I had available for "/home". Furthermore, if I was going to dual-boot I'd make sure I was using a recent (within the last six months) kernel so that I could make "/home" NTFS. I don't know what the minimum size for Vista is, but I guess that an 80GB drive would gold both the 30GB "/" partition and the Vista partition, then a huge drive for "/home", with Vista's "My Documents" remapped onto it as well.

But that's just me. And it's all theoretical 'cos I don't think I would have Vista in th house.

haha my 5 year old G3 iBook is (somehow) still running with a 30GB hard drive and 128MB of RAM. i am (hopefully) getting a new computer fairly soon anyway. would i be better off trying to upgrade this one or should i just start from scratch with a £700 MacBook?

"Buildfromscratch.co.uk" doesn't seem to exist any more.

Indeed it is amazing how much things move on in the computing world. Only seven months after the article was written and already USB sticks were making ZIP drives obsolete. Another 8 years (give or take) further on, and not only are ZIP drives (a white elephant to begin with, IMO) consigned firmly to the dustbin of history, the 128MB USB sticks the OP mentions are some 16 times smaller than the smallest examples on the market today, and much in the article is even more obsolete. Windows XP is not the new thiong everyone's wondering if it's worth upgrading to- it's yeasterday's news and people were actually wanting to downgrade to it not so long ago. Linux (well, some distros) is actually improving in the stright-out-of-the-box usability stakes, who even thinks about dips and jumpers when building a PC (I am admittedly a novice, but never needed to know when learning about PC building at college), 512MB RAM is far too small and slow to take your average modern software (my PC aquired around the same time as this article was written proves this adequately) and so it goes on.