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My dad and I replaced a 100MB HDD with a 1GB HDD for $100. When did this happen?

37 points by xnyan ↗ HN
In a very early memory and the start of my obsession with computers, my father upgraded his 100MB hard drive with a 1GB drive for $100 USD. I remember everything about that moment such as the smell of a room packed electronics, how excited my dad was to get what seemed like an inconceivable amount of storage (694 floppies, I remember doing the math), and the exact purchase price and size, $100 and 1GB.

The only thing I don't remember is when this happed. I can't ask my father unfortunately but would love to place this event in time. I remember it was very notable that 1GB could be bought for as low as $100 and it happened at a small local PC sales and repair store located in the US South. 1995 maybe?

38 comments

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h2odragon
95 or 96 sounds like a good guess.

Recall anything about the drive? was it as big as the old one, or was it 3.5in?

its quite likely you got a disk controller with the drive as well, the switch from ST506 to IDE/ATA had happened in the interval.

brudgers
100MB sounds like IDE to me. ST506 was "early" and 100MB would have been relatively exotic for a PC user and definitely expensive.
pestatije
$100...not the cheapest drive available, so it must have been soon after they were released...id say 1996
giantg2
I'd say probably around '97 or '98, possibly a year or so later if that cost included services like labor to do the swap.
actionfromafar
$100 has remained a rule of thumb for most space for dollars.
[dead] liquid153
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dang
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

williamDafoe
1995 is too early. I am guessing 1998-2004. Was the 1GB drive the state of the art? I was buying my sons 2GB drives in the early 2010s for about $100 - you just didnt need that much storage before games like flight sinulator and forza horizon blew up ...
zoky
No way you were buying 2GB drives in the 2010s, certainly not for $100. 2TB drives, maybe.
Dwedit
I think you might be using the wrong unit.
42lux
I would say 1997 and it was probably a maxtor drive :P
teleforce
Well done mate, you not only probably get the correct time but the brand as well.
ProllyInfamous
It was a Deathstar ("DeskStar" model), most likely, destined for corruptive data spins.
blindriver
95 or 96. I replaced my 500MB drive with a 2Gb drive when I was living in a specific apartment during 95/96, most likely 96.
alchemist1e9
Am I the only one who feels this type of post isn’t HN worthy?
dang
It shouldn't be the main dish but a little is ok. It's conversational and that's good.
gnabgib
But this revival is also the product of the second-chance pool :D
dang
That's true - I hadn't noticed!
frankwiles
It’s about a cute tech memory, which likely brings back various memories for us all. I think worrying about the worthiness of a tech news site isn’t worthy of our time.
alchemist1e9
Feels like there has been a change in either policy or taste though.

I’ve been here for a long time, much longer than this account and something if different in maybe last year or so.

vlasky
I wouldn't want to see this sort of post everyday, but I thought it was an interesting forensic exercise - kind of like carbon dating.

Just for fun, I used ChatGPT 4o to answer the question. It reckoned 1997.

proactivesvcs
I had an 81MB (87MB?) 2.5" hard drive for my Acorn Archimedes A3010 circa 1996ish. I'd guess after then and before 2000 - by then I had a proper, grow-up job doing tech support and PC building and I'm sure we rarely, if ever, sold drives in the megabytes.
juancn
I remember doing a similar upgrade in 1996 when I was in second year of college. But at that price it has to be 1997 or later which is when we hit a dime per MB.
DaveInTucson
I remember in the early 90s seeing 8 GB hard drives being advertised for sale, and thinking "who on earth would need 8 gigs of hard drive storage?"

(Me, that's who. I now have 63+ GB just under my Music folder)

makz
You made me remember something. When I got my first computer it had 4 gb of disk space. I had no internet then. It seemed a huge amount of space. When I got internet, suddenly I filled it up within a month or so
runlaszlorun
4GB! such frivolous luxury!

my first was actually a timex sinclair. for storage it had… well… 0gb/mb/kb. seriously. It’d boot into Basic and you’d have to type in whatever you wanted it to do.

There was some short little game we found in a magazine that involved dodging falling letters. So we’d type it in each time to play. Soon we were doing from memory and that was a pretty good… albeit fairly odd… way to pick up programming!

neogodless
In 1998, I bought a computer from a friend in college. Not sure what the storage was - maybe 2GB. But the next computer was one I built and it had a huge 10GB drive! That might have been 1999.
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longshotanalyst
A question is: what kind of computer would have run both a 100meg and 1gig HD? Many computers that would have run a 100meg would have various BIOS or other limitations with a 1gig.

Proposed Scenario: The 100meg drive was bought for ~$330 in ~1991. It was brought over during an upgrade to a 486dx2/66 in late 1993/early 1994. Then, in late 1996/early 1997 the 1 gig drive was bought to make space for bigger games and to try to run Win95 on the computer.

M95D
My 486 (PCI system) had a 1GB HDD when most computers were sold with less than 500MB HDD. This was in '96. About 2 years later I installed a second 4GB HDD. There were no compatibility problems, HW or SW.
eterevsky
I bought my first PC around 1996. It had a 850 MB hard drive from WD which costed $100 or less. Probably around the same time you upgraded to 1 GB.
runlaszlorun
I often find myself using this site for historical numbers:

https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm

for general reference, there are seperate sites linked to for RAM or SSD prices.

Keep in mind, the site I posted lists the absolute cheapest $/MB on the market at that time. I think that’s a useful number in order to have somewhat of a benchmark. But any particular drive (like yours) is prob not the most rock bottom, cheapest per MB.

From the numbers listed there, I would’ve guessed 1996 or so.

bharath1097
My father bought our family's first computer in mid 1998. It was assembled by my father's friend. I remember it having a 2GB hard drive that cost the equivalent of around $100 in our local currency.