My replacement running that operating system (which has since been rebranded TrueNAS) put six of my old terabyte drives to use as a RAIDZ2 array, resulting in four terabytes of capacity and tolerance of up to two drive failures. In this environment, the only conceivable use I have for these old drives is to put them together into a large storage array, which motivated me to retire my two-drive FreeNAS box. This became sillier and sillier every year, especially now that the two worlds have met back up: Sometime within the past year I noticed I can buy an one terabyte solid state drive for under $100 USD. An earlier purge dismissed everything under one terabyte, but with the wonder of the terabyte milestone still in my mind I held on to those one terabyte and higher. SSD capacities have since grown, as our digital lives have also grown such that a terabyte of data no longer feels gargantuan.Īs someone who has played with computers for a while, I naturally had a pile of retired hard drives. The answer to the latter turned out to be solid state drives that sacrificed capacity but had far superior performance. At the time it seemed like an enormous amount of space and I had no idea how I could possibly use it all, and where the storage industry could go when additional capacity didn’t seem as useful as it once did.

I remember when consumer level hard drives reached one terabyte of capacity.

Seagate backup plus slim 1.5 tb