How Big Was Your First Internal Hard Drive?

Well, I'm a little older than your "average" Geek here, and I come from the pre hard drive days. In the beginning we would lose anything in memory upon power down. We graduated to the then "massive" storage device of 5.25" floppy disk. Usually one for the OS and one for storage. I didn't have an actual hard drive until my first 286 computer.

My first hard drive was a whopping 40 megabyte...that's right MEGABYTE...not GIGABYTE! It had a 30 meg partition for DOS and later I installed Windows 3.0 (not 3.1), and a hidden 10 meg partition. Ah, those were the days!

How big was your first internal drive? Inquiring minds want to know. :)

Tags: first, hard drive, hardware, size

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Permalink Reply by Bill K on April 9, 2009 at 5:40pm: YEA 30GBs and was told that that was PLENTY.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tracy on April 10, 2009 at 4:49am: 13 GB- & I thought I was super, cutting edge!

Circa 1999, Dell Dimension T450 tower...I was in heaven!

Circa 2000- 1 yr. warranty over, I started my hands-on education in tech: installed a larger, faster drive, Powerleap 1.2ghz CPU, along with RAM upgrade & Promise card to boost IDE speed...been learning ever since!

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Permalink Reply by Trent on April 10, 2009 at 5:42pm: It was a Conner with a whooping 170MB. Still have it as a matter of fact. Of course I no longer use it :-); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by jake on April 12, 2009 at 6:20am: does it still work?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bob on April 12, 2009 at 3:25am: Oh yeah, we need to keep in mind that the entire OS was on on 5 1/4" Floppy, when they really were "floppies". On my first self-owned PC, I could only afford the 5 megabyte PC for my DEC Rainbow 100+. It was a dual boot PC in that I could boot into either CPM or DOS. Eventually I upgraded to a 40 MegaByte Drive.

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Permalink Reply by Blake on April 12, 2009 at 3:55am: 784mb on a old powerbook with a floppy drive.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ash on April 12, 2009 at 4:55am: Probably several hundred megabytes.. it wasn't a bad computer for its time actually. Used to love playing Doom and RTS games.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by jake on April 12, 2009 at 6:19am: the first pc i used and we owned had a 9 or 10gb hdd in it. the oldest hdd i have ued had about 40mb on it. these days i run on over 250gb on my laptop 200gb on one of my desktops. 2x 80gb desktops + 1 80gb laptop and 1 160gb laptop; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Evo on April 12, 2009 at 6:40am: 540mb running windows 3.1, well at least not the first 2+ weeks of having the thing. System was infected and had to wait for the pack of diskettes to restore the system.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David on April 12, 2009 at 6:46am: My first computer (not the family computer) was a Gateway 2000 desktop that I got for Christmas in 1997. I forget the exact capacity, but I remember thinking it was the best think in the world (LOL Windows 95) when I got it!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Dan on April 12, 2009 at 9:22am: My first storage device was cassette tape recorder with a home made interface to a Commodore 64, eventually I was able to afford the massive 128kb 5 1/4" external floppy drive for it. I ran that thing for nearly 10 years. For the PC, it was a 20 Mb (yes, that's 20 Megabytes) with an intel 286 processor. DOS 5.0 (I think) and Windows 3.0. Does this date me or what? LOL!
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Permalink Reply by Annie K on April 13, 2009 at 6:32am: At least you had DOS 5 ...I had DOS 3.1 and couldn't even use 3.5 floppy drive (without at least DOS 3.3) - Mine was a 286 with 1MB RAM (!) and a 20MB HD.; ▶ Reply to This