Lacie’s 250gB Porsche hard drive.

It’s fifty years since IBM shipped the first computer hard disk drive. Its platters were some 24″ in diameter and it weighed one ton, requiring delivery by fork lift. There were 24 disks in the pack and you can see them here:

It stored 4.4 megabytes. Suffice it to say that only fat bankers could afford them for an annual lease payment of $35,000, or $400,000 in today’s money.

When asked why they didn’t increase the capacity for another three years, IBM responded that Marketing had concluded that there was no way they could sell something larger, as no one would ever need it….

Today that drive woud not store one photograph taken on a Canon 5D digital camera. My iPod stores almost fourteen thousand times as much data.

You can buy Lacie’s 250gB desktop hard drive for $140 from Lacie. Products from other reputable manufacturer’s abound – I mention Lacie because it works for me, comes in fast Firewire for use with Macs and is almost bearable to look at. You don’t need a fork lift to install it. And you will sleep well at night knowing everything is backed up. If Apple’s contention that only 4% of users back-up daily is correct, chances are you are one of those who does not. And with all photographs being digital nowadays (even film users have to scan their originals for printing or back-up) those originals are simply too precious to lose.

And don’t wait for Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, with its built in back-up functions, to ship next spring. Buy good back-up software like SuperDuper! now. Want to bet that you will not crash over the next two quarters? There are other products but Lacie’s Silverkeeper (now ‘1-Click’) has never worked for me and my copy of Dantz’s Retrospect not only failed all the time (and Dantz could not/would not help), the software was written by someone with a grasp of English comparable to that enjoyed by the Hispanic laborers who pick the grapes every year in my vineyard.

Storage is cheap. Good pictures are not.