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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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damian Baughman on April 9, 2009 at 6:44am: 6.4Gigs; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Phillip H. Blanton on April 9, 2009 at 6:46am: My first PC was a Tandy 1000TX. It was a hybrid, meaning it had a 286 processor but the board ran an 8bit bus, sort of like a 286 SX.

It came with an optinal 20MB "Hard Card" for $400, which was the hard drive permanently affixed to the controller card. It slid into the expansion port much like today's honkin video cards do.

Back then the hard drive controller wasn't part of the motherboard.

I also was thrilled that it had a CGA monitor. Most of my friends didn't have color monitors.

Let's see, that was about 1987. Before that I had a Tandy TRS-80 that used a casette tape player for data.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Mark on April 9, 2009 at 7:17am: Mine was 20gig in a laptop.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Zagorath on April 9, 2009 at 7:24am: *Sigh*
I wish I could give a story like that, to have been around when less then one gig of HDD was plenty. I definitely would have loved to have had a chance to use a Commodore 64.
Sadly the first hard drive I remember was 40GB, it a computer I still have, but never use. I'm not even sure it it will still boot up...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Edward Gelb on April 9, 2009 at 7:28am: My first home computer, an IBM Thinkpad, 360CS, had 4MB of memory, a 170MB internal hard drive, and Win3.11 intalled. I purchased it in 1994 and still have it although it is not being used, because it is locked up due to a bad software install. I loved the keyboard on this laptop.

My office computer, an IBM 433 DX/Si had 64MB of memory, a 121MB internal hard drive, and Win3.11 installed. This computer has the famous model M keyboard from 1993. I still have this computer, although it sits in storage. Prior to this computer, I had another IBM desktop with a monochrome (green) monitor and two floppy disk drives. They were the large floppies.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by TTECH inc. on April 9, 2009 at 7:38am: 200 megabytes!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by TheGratefulNed on April 9, 2009 at 7:43am: My first computer was an 8088 with dual 5.25" floppy drives, no HD. I used that until pretty late in the 486 days when I got a Packard Hell with a 420MB (pre-formatted) HD. I remember thinking, "I'll never have to worry about storage again." Now I'm working with only a 2-3GB free out of ~400GB of total storage across two systems.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by RedVegetarian on April 9, 2009 at 9:06am: I had a PC/XT clone I slapped together- first system with a hard drive- an entire 10 Megs ! It was an original IBM / Seagate from a wrecked PC/XT I rescued.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Jeremy Hyde on April 9, 2009 at 9:15am: My first computer was a $500 eMachine with an 18gb hard drive, which was about the standard size for the time period. It's hard to believe that was only 8 years ago. By the way, does anybody know where to get a good deal on a 1 terabyte external hard drive?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Stephen on April 9, 2009 at 9:26am: My first internal drive was a full-height 5MB drive -- don't remember the vendor but I installed it into my PC XT. (I had to remove a full-height floppy to make it fit.) I quickly expanded to a whopping 30 MB RLL hard disk when the first drive died. I paid $10/MB for the and that drive lasted me a long time -- I'm pretty sure it lasted me all the way through DOS.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Clinton on April 9, 2009 at 10:10am: My first hard drive was 125 MB.....not GB.....lol; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Devil on April 9, 2009 at 10:11am: whoa guys
my first comp had humble 10 gigs....
i think it was back in 1996-97
i was just 3 or 4 years old; ▶ Reply to This