Interesting PC Question

[Code Doc]

Back in 1979, the Apple II was available with a floppy disk drive that allowed for 128 KB of mass storage for users. Hard disk drives did not exist. The Apple II drive was about the largest amount of available disk storage for a PC until the IBM PC arrived later. Assume that each Apple floppy disk drive was about 3" high, 6" wide, and 9" deep.

(1) How many of these Apple II disk drives would have to be stacked up vertically to equal the storage capacity of just one of the largest hard disk drives available for a PC today, and how tall would the stack be?

(2) How many cubic feet of space would this stack of Apple II disk drives occupy?

[LaVolpe]

Ah, a trick question for sure...

By the time you stacked them, a newer, faster, larger capacity hard drive would be available

[Code Doc]

Ah, a trick question for sure...

By the time you stacked them, a newer, faster, larger capacity hard drive would be available

Perhaps, but I believe you are thinking too deeply.

I came up with this, but I may be wrong. Please advise:
1 TB drive = 8,388,608 Apple II floppy drives

If so, then the stack of Apple II drives would be 2,097,152 feet tall or the height of 1,670 Empire State Buildings standing on end.

Total volume = 786,432 Cu Ft

Therefore, a small blanket chest full of PC hard drives would easily store a Pentagon packed tight with Apple II drives and perhaps the courtyard inside the Pentagon as well, filled to the height of the building.

[LaVolpe]

If so, then the stack of Apple II drives would be 2,097,152 feet tall or the height of 1,670 Empire State Buildings standing on end.

Or, as the crow flies, almost exact distance from Chicago IL to Pittsburgh PA. That distance is 411 miles, your stack is 397 miles, layed out horizontally bottom to top (5,280 feet per mile)

Want to get even more impressive numbers, lay them out end to end and multiply their "space" by 3. That's almost exactly the distance from Chicago to Miami FL (1,192 miles) with a difference of only 1 mile.

[Code Doc]

Or, as the crow flies, almost exact distance from Chicago IL to Pittsburgh PA. That distance is 411 miles, your stack is 397 miles, layed out horizontally bottom to top (5,280 feet per mile)

Want to even get more impressive numbers, lay them out end to end and multiply their "space" by 3.

Perhaps even more impressive:

I have four Apple II drives available in my storage closet along with an Apple II+ and an Apple IIe. Both would boot today and run if I plugged them in and turned them on with a boot disk in Drive 1. The Imagewriter II would print at nearly 400 CPS in draft mode--not bad for a clunker. What do I do with all three?

[Shaggy Hiker]

You could probably divide your answer in half, since the actual storage space on those discs could be doubled with a hole punch.

[honeybee]

Oh, gone are the days when having two floppy drives was considered a major advantage as you could then toggle between C: and D: and run programs from either.

We had a BBC Spectrum Plus once. It had two modes for programming, one with 32kb and one with 48kb. While the 32kb mode was an ordinary one like any others, the 48kb mode had an interesting feature. The mode would predict what you were going to type next. For e.g. when writing a new statement, the first word would be one of the few keywords such as LET or PRINT and some such. The keyboard had the alphabet and other keys double up as special keys with each key having one of the keywords. So all you needed to do was tap the right key for the right keyword and the program would take just minutes to type in. Wish that feature was available today.

Unfortunately our casette recorder was too weak in volume for the machine to record its programs to, and so I had to retype whole programs to play games.

.

[Shaggy Hiker]

So all you needed to do was tap the right key for the right keyword and the program would take just minutes to type in. Wish that feature was available today.

So you were using Intellisense for VERY small programs.

[Code Doc]

You could probably divide your answer in half, since the actual storage space on those discs could be doubled with a hole punch.

True. I remember doing exactly that for hundreds of disks we sent out. As the text files got bigger, we had no choice. I can't recall if Apple ever made a 3.5" disk drive for the II, II+, IIe series, but I think the Mac and PC's 3.5" drives sealed its doom anyway.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I think they did make that drive for the last few in the series. I'm not sure about as far back as the II+, though.

[honeybee]

So you were using Intellisense for VERY small programs.

It was more of a shorthand to longhand conversion than intellisense, IMO. For e.g. if you were just starting the line, only a few keywords can appear at the start. Barring these, if you pressed any other key, it would beep and let you know the error. The only things I typed were variable names and string literals. It did speed up the coding a lot.

The battery compartment used to get quite hot, and then the whole thing would freeze. I remember when playing games on it in the afternoon, I used to wet a kerchief and roll it up and place it under the battery compartment to help it cool off.

.

[Code Doc]

Does anyone else remember how many power supplies failed on the Apple II series machines? Anybody replace them as many times as I did, looking for bargain power supplies?

[dilettante]

No, I had Commodore machines from the 1970s. Built like tanks, 170K floppies instead of a more meager 128K. Guy I sold them to says they still run.

[Lord Orwell]

the only questions i have are are we stacking drives instead of the disks? Also i was raised on commodore as well, and i had to replace the power supply on THAT. I didn't go the cheap route either. The new one looked like a power converter. Metal box with an indicator light. As for the floppy drive, this was one of my first hardware mods. Instead of punching holes in the hundreds of disks i owned, instead i bypassed the notch sensor. That drive was something. It actually had a built in computer and the settings could be reprogrammed. This is one of the main staples of the copy protection schemes they used back then. A disk's bootloader would reprogram the drive and make it able to read the rest of the disk. amiga floppy drives were the same way. This is also how the quick-loaders worked. They set up a handshake with a client program on the computer and transferred data an average of 8x the speed of the stock program. when Final Cartridge 3 was first released, it was hitting speeds of 25x but there were incompatibilites so they cut it back. That cartridge could literally do anything you wished. I could dump any game to disk, scroll up or down in program listings, use a built-in assembler, etc. It even had a quick-loading GUI similar to windows 1.0 that supported a mouse! Among other things, it had an 80-character text editor with numerous fonts. An accomplishment considering the c64 had a 40-char display.

[JuggaloBrotha]

Perhaps, but I believe you are thinking too deeply.

I came up with this, but I may be wrong. Please advise:
1 TB drive = 8,388,608 Apple II floppy drives

If so, then the stack of Apple II drives would be 2,097,152 feet tall or the height of 1,670 Empire State Buildings standing on end.

Total volume = 786,432 Cu Ft

Therefore, a small blanket chest full of PC hard drives would easily store a Pentagon packed tight with Apple II drives and perhaps the courtyard inside the Pentagon as well, filled to the height of the building.

Ah, but aren't they up to 4TB drives these days? I'm pretty sure I saw a corporate grade 4TB drive within the last year

[NickThissen]

Ah, but aren't they up to 4TB drives these days? I'm pretty sure I saw a corporate grade 4TB drive within the last year

The highest capacity I found is 3TB:
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-d...eskstar-7k3000
It has around 400 Gbits/in², and people are developing methods to get up to 12 Tbits/in² so in a couple of years we might have 90TB hard-drives PC's can't handle that kind of storage at the moment though, at most 2.2 TB or something I think?

[Lord Orwell]

The highest capacity I found is 3TB:
http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-d...eskstar-7k3000
It has around 400 Gbits/in², and people are developing methods to get up to 12 Tbits/in² so in a couple of years we might have 90TB hard-drives PC's can't handle that kind of storage at the moment though, at most 2.2 TB or something I think?

depends on the motherboard. Some pcs can't boot the 3tb ones. NT's file system is capable of accessing something around 16 billion gigabytes.

[NickThissen]

depends on the motherboard. Some pcs can't boot the 3tb ones. NT's file system is capable of accessing something around 16 billion gigabytes.

I read this right here:

As hard drives are introduced with capacities greater than or equal to 2.2TB, the industry works to resolve known capacity addressing limitations that date back to the original design of the PC. These limitations are caused by 32-bit definitions used for partition sizes and logical block addresses (LBAs) resulting in a maximum addressable capacity size of 2.199TB.

The most direct way to resolve this issue is to use Long LBAs. However, Long LBAs are only supported in 64-bit operating systems, like Windows™ 7 and Windows Vista™. Users wishing to use these high-capacity drives will need to implement a combination of operating system, BIOS, drive partition tables and hard disk drive (HDD) drivers that support high-capacity drives in order to gain full access to the high capacities offered. When working in legacy environments, more effort will be required to ensure all components are capable of supporting high-capacity drives.

[Lord Orwell]

I read this right here:

this is exactly why some motherboards can't boot the 3tb drives. A workaround is to partition the drive just like you had to when you hit the 137gb limit in years past. The truth about hard drives is that it really can't access more than 512bytes. The controller card does magic and tricks the ide into accessing 512 at a time but a different 512. Now from what i understand this has a new wrinkle with the new super-large drives in that the drive doesn't actually have sectors at all but the controller on the drive emulates them in some manner.

[Code Doc]

Actually, Lord Orwell, I was referring to the original 128 KB disk drives (about 3" tall), not the floppy disks themselves, which were about 1/16" thick in total. Most of that thickness was the jacket.

I do recall that companies tried to make big bucks selling half-height drives because Apple's drives often gave up. I bought one myself when one of the original Apple II drives conked out. Replacing it with a half-height clone was cheaper than repairing it.

The clone drive never failed.