Questions tagged [storage]
For questions on information storage on retrocomputing platforms.
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What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
I came of age in the 1980s and worked on various minis and mainframes in high school and college (mostly DEC but also Univac and IBM). Even though I was an enthusiast then (as now), I never really ...
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Could today's flash memory be used instead of RAM in 1980s 8 bit machines?
I wonder if this is possible and could be a retro-project? (Not something I would try myself, though)
The bandwidth of flash is surely faster than yesterday's 1980s RAM (?)
Why? One possible ...
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2
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What other terms have been used to describe storing working data permanently besides "save"?
Today, we "save" the file we're working on to disk. This terminology appears to be specific to architectures combining volatile and non-volatile memory. I also distinctly remember a "...
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Digitally stored data world total history?
Storage clusters now reach 1TiB/s speed (cern, ceph) so I was wondering: when did the world total stored digital data reach a terabyte? Was there research on the topic? The System/360 in 1964 shipped ...
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4
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1
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Why didn't the CD come with a caddy by default? [closed]
I've had plenty of scratched disks over the years, even scratched many myself when I was a kid. But it's my scratched copy of Call of Duty World at War for the PS3 that really makes me ask this ...
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When did wear leveling in flash storage come up?
I think most modern flash drives (from SATA disks to USB drives) have some kind of wear leveling.
Normally a block (small amount of bytes) in a flash chip cannot be erased and programed an unlimited ...
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8
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Zip drive eject "tool"
So I am trying to manually eject a Zip disk from a Zip drive. This is not a OEM Zip drive, but one made specifically for a Pentium laptop. I went to the dollar store and bought a pack of paper clips,...
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2
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How did StorageTek STC 4305 use backing HDDs?
StorageTek STC 4305 is often referred as the first SSD. However, from the modern point of view, it looks more like a "hardware-implemented persistent cache", if possible. I mean that it ...
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9
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1
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How did Ridge Racer the arcade game store its music?
For both Daytona USA and Sega Rally (released around the same time but produced by SEGA), the arcade machines had sort of a synthesizer soundtrack with no CD-ROM involved. Only the home ports of those ...
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Is there any hardware that lets me use floppy drives with low level formatting capability on a modern pc? [duplicate]
There's a bunch of usb floppy drives out there but it's clear they're quite limited. I want the ability to low level format my disks. Is there any usb/pci/anything adapter that can interface with ...
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Did something like floppy disk jukeboxes for home computers exist in the 70s or 80s? Would that have been a feasible concept?
Many home computers in the 1970s and 1980s had two floppy disk drives, or owners bought a second drive, to reduce having to play disk jockey. A second drive was especially popular with Commodore Amiga ...
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How did reserve tracks work on early hard disks?
The Wikipedia article History of IBM magnetic disk drives describes the details of the IBM 2311 device, introduced in 1964, as
The 2311 stores 7.25 megabytes on a single removable IBM 1316 disk pack. ...
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1
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What information could be recovered from visualized magnetic information?
I was wondering how the data on a floppy disk physically looks like. With data stored on a magnetic disk obviously that isn't visible. The Wikipedia article on floppy disks however shows a beautiful ...
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How does a floppy drive identify the first and last sectors and tracks?
I've recently found a more modern application "Floppy Disk Master-7"(Picture 2) (FDM) that visualized the bad sectors, tracks and clusters(Picture 1) on a floppy disk in a similar (but ...
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3
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How to determine the required RPM for a 3.5-inch floppy disk?
In addition to my other related question Is it possible to read floppy disks at non-standard rotation speeds (RPM)?.
How to determine the required RPM for a 3.5-inch floppy disk as disks can ...
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4
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Is it possible to read floppy disks at non-standard rotation speeds (RPM)?
According to this article 3.5-inch floppies rotate 300-600 times per minute (RPM). It is possible to overclock the RPM and will that result in higher transfer speeds? Or is it possible to read a disk ...
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What is the effect of direct exposure of the magnetic disk of a floppy to ultraviolet (UV) light?
I was thinking of the mold issue of floppies and UV light (UV-C) came to mind. As ultraviolet (UV) is a form of electromagnetic radiation and floppies use a magnetic disk for storage and I vaguely ...
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3
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Definitive list of music bands/groups that included computer programs on their analogue audio music physical media releases (LPs, singles)
Is there a definitive list of music pop/rock bands/groups that included computer programs as part of their physical analogue audio music releases? (vinyl LPs, EPs, singles) etc?
For this to be ...
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When did 5.25″ floppies exceed the capacity of 8″?
When 5.25″ floppies were introduced, in the mid-to-late seventies, they would have had less capacity than the older 8″ because, well, less area on which to store data.
On the other hand, being cheaper ...
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Why Kansas City Standard (KCS/CUTS) differs from Bell 103/202/212 modem protocol?
While both were data transfer protocols serving streams at 300/1200 baud, why did they choose different frequencies, marks, modulation, and anything else?
I understand that they serve different ...
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4
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Cheapest way to store and load small dataset in the 80s?
An extra, costly floppy drive would overkill when transferring a page of letter, storing game level data, or distributing a piece of BASIC program, and non built-in ones have to be paid. A tape ...
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How can I store a machine language program to disk on a C64?
I know I can use LOAD "PROGRAM",8,1 to load a program in a certain spot in memory, using the first two bytes of the file on disk.
Now let's say I have used the .MON command on the Final ...
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What is the (standardized) weight of a 3.5 inch floppy disk?
What is the weight of a 3.5 inch floppy disk and was the weight ever standardized?
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Did the original Japanese Tamagotchi device really die *completely* (forever) if the digital pet died? [closed]
Ever since 1997, I've had this "factoid" in my head that the original release of Tamagotchi in Japan had no "reset" feature, and you could not remove the batteries to reset it ...
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1
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What's with the TX-0 punchtape instructions?
The TX-0 has a class of instructions very similar to the PDP-style microprogrammed, operation instructions. Fill the opcode field with all ones, and then select which microoperations you want to ...
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Did the Commodore datasette interface provide greater reliability?
Cassette, being cheaper than a floppy disk drive, was a popular storage medium in the 8-bit era. Some computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, just provided a port to plug in an existing cassette deck....
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2
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Bakelite as data storage
Was bakelite used for computer data storage like it was used for grammophone records? My brother says he remembers this but I cannot find it on Google.
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What is the massive CD drive used in the movie "Licence to Kill"?
In the movie Licence to Kill, James Bond breaks into Felix Leiter's house and gets a CD out from behind a picture. He then sticks a CD in an absolutely massive CD drive. It was about three times the ...
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Why were optical drives not used as secondary storage instead of magnetic drives?
What prevented optical drives from being used as the dominant secondary storage like the magnetic disk drives, in PCs? Was it entirely technical limitation or other issues like late development and ...
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Why did Western Digital name their drives "Caviar"? [closed]
I'm asking in Retrocomputing because the Caviar line of HDDs was released in the most recent era of retrocomputing.
Does anyone know why they named the line "Caviar"? Why do they associate Sturgeons ...
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MASS MicroSystems MO/128 Magneto-Optic Drive mystery
I found this drive in one of Atari lots. Apart from few mentions in old articles I can't find any info whatsoever. Can you help please?
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6
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Multiple mass storage controllers on Amiga 500 or 2000
I'm in the process of restocking a lost collection of retro machines, including a couple of A500s, a 500+ and 2 A2000s (rev 4.1 and 6) in various states of disrepair. For one of the 2000s I would ...
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what OS runs Zip drives? [duplicate]
I came across my old Zip drive and some Zip disks. I am curious what is on the disks, but my Windows system won't run them. Back in the day I thought that these would be the ultimate in archive ...
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1
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Which tape drives were the last to offer backward compatibility with QIC-150 Tape Cartridges?
I currently have some QIC-150 tape cartridges. These are the Imation DC6250 250 MB tapes. I understand that this came out in the late 1990's. I'd like to read these using a tape drive but want to find ...
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Using a modern PC or other digital audio recording device as a cassette recorder replacement
I'm having a hell of a time getting this to work. I've got a Casio fx-720p + FA-3 cassette interface, a TRS-80 PC-3 with its cassette interface and printer dock, and a Tandy 102 with a cassette cable.
...
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Archiving data on a nonmagnetic storage [closed]
I know that we have LTO tapes, which have really good longevity and are reliable. But they're still magnetic so they're not protected against big magnetic wave (e.g. from sun).
There is an option to ...
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Was photographic film ever used for digital data storage?
I was thinking about how Williams Tubes worked and how one could hypothetically "snapshot" (quite literally!) the state of a computer's memory by simply taking a photograph of the phosphor end of a ...
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Cannot boot from a Compact Flash card
I am trying to fix up an old work computer I have from the early to mid 90's.
Everything works fine, but the hard drive makes a horrible clicking noise when it loads anything, so I decided to ...
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What happened to bubble memory - is it still being sold?
At one time bubble memory was advertised as being able to store huge amounts of data in the size of a sugar cube. I don't remember what the memory density was compared to today's SD cards. What ...
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Can a HiFi speaker erase a floppy disk?
I played 20 minutes of music with a floppy disk directly in front of the speaker's subwoofer. No damaged sectors at all.
Can a speaker actually erase a floppy disk? How close does it need to be?
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Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
I can imagine the following situation 20 to 40 years ago inside a working office between two colleagues:
"Can I have a copy?"
"Sure, wait a moment....done! [eject] I'll pass that floppy disk onto ...
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How long can a HD floppy disk hold 2.88MB before erasing itself?
From Wikipedia - Floppy_disk:
to format or write to this high-coercivity media, the high-density drive switched its heads into a mode using a stronger magnetic field. When these stronger fields ...
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DD vs HD vs ED floppy disks: lifespan/writecycle difference? Other differences?
DD, HD and ED floppy disks have individual materials to match their densities.
But is density their only difference?
Are there any differences regarding:
Maximum allowable rotation speed?
Rewrite ...
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Do DD floppy disks need regular full reformats?
http://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/5449?noredirect=1
Floppy Disks have tracks that can be destroyed by a magnet, which would cause it to need full reformats, as stated in the answer link above....
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What was the block spacing in early hard disks?
Early floppy disks had significant spacing between blocks, e.g. a PC 5.25" disk had a theoretical capacity of about 500K but was formatted as 360K, nine blocks per track, with a substantial fraction ...
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Which MS-/PC-DOS version was the first to allow multiple partitions to be used?
For IBM PC-DOS/Microsoft MS-DOS, which version was the first version to actually allow using more than one partition for data storage? How about using multiple primary partitions vs one primary plus ...
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What is the difference between DriveSpace and DoubleSpace?
DriveSpace is the successor to DoubleSpace. Both are DOS systems that mount a Compressed Volume File as a drive, allowing ordinary programs to interface with a compressed drive without an intermediate ...
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What is the history of data compression tools on personal computers?
On UNIX, the progression of the most widespread data compression programs was as follows:
(AFAIR: Pre System V) compact (suffix .C), dynamic Huffman coding
(AFAIR: introduced in System V) pack (...
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14
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How does ProDOS allow for multiple volumes to exist on a single device?
On the back of this question, it got me thinking that it has always been that ProDOS would only support a ",D1" and ",D2" on a slot, i.e. slot 6 would have two addressible drives. With my 20MB Sider ...
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Magnetic tapes as a random access medium?
A two-part question:
How widespread in legacy systems was the practice of using magnetic tapes as a genuinely random access medium at the OS level by pre-formatting them in a way before the first use,...
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