The external disc storage format wars
Way back in the ether of the mid 90's while Oasis and blur waged war over the headlines and charts another battle was being fought in the IT world... the battle for the external storage market!
Hard disks were stupidly expensive and my 500mb drive was quickly running slower than heather mills, not least as back then the hard disk would also frequently run as virtual memory since actual RAM memory was even more expensive.
The only option was to archive off the old files (which I now know to have been junk) and restore my overpriced computer to it's former glory.
Now the headline grabber at the time was the Iomega Zip drive (see local car boot sale for about £1), which priced at £120 used 100mb disks costing about £10. Not bad. However also grabbing the media attention was the SyQuest EZ 230 drive, again priced a little more than the Zip it's discs were a massive 230mb Woo Hoo!
The battle reigned with every manufacturer getting in on the action. There were optical drives (think CDR in floppy disc format) and magnetic drives (think big capacity floppy disc) like the Zip drive. Then what I knew would be the ultimate solution came to the market. A conglomerate product between Nomai and D2 they released the DZ540 drive. This beast could cram a massive 540mb onto a single disc!!! I could back up my whole hard disk in one go! Woo Hoo! Ancient review here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/components/3570/electronique-d2-nomai-540
Having a Mac Powerbook 5300cs (yep, an apple laptop at a bargain price of £2400!!!) I needed an external drive version so the extra cost of the external case brought the drive in at a bargain price of £350. Plus 3 discs costing me £45 each. All this on a student loan.
Once I got it I formatted the discs (hours), backed up my hard disk (hours) and cleaned things up.
Over the next few months my laptop crashed and became increasingly hard to use. Then the college bought a CD writer and I was able to back my stuff up to CD instead. The DZ drive went unused.
A year later I tried to retrieve stuff from the disc and discovered the drive no longer worked anyway. Nobody sold the discs for it anymore and the format was dead.
Just under £500 to back up and fail to restore a few pieces of coursework and an assortment of animated gifs and other junk downloaded from the web.

New hard disks with gigabytes of storage for £25, Flash memory cards under £5, kids today don't know they're born!
(golddust QOTW now revolves around being a cunt, Wed 6 Oct 2010, 11:06, 3 replies)

pff, I remember Zip drives
I got one free (sis worked for Iomega) - power adapter died within a week, then when it got replaced, it got the click of death - still felt ripped off even though it was free
( Mighty Nibus who dares gins | @nibus, Wed 6 Oct 2010, 12:36, closed)

About 10 years ago
I was slowly building up a collection of files I wanted to make sure were backed up. My last back up used 103 floppy disks. double-sided double density 720k disks that I had previously used for the Amiga.
I wasn't going through all that again, so I bought a used internal Jaz drive and 3 cartridges off ebay for £70. These fuckers held 1Gb. Huzzah!

I didn't know at the time, but the cartridges are essentially the platters from a hard drive and the drive is the read mechanism. A good idea it seemed, though thinking back I could've bought a 3Gb hdd for less than £70 anyway.

One of the cartridges didn't work and the others were not very well either. It never really worked properly as I had to go out and buy a cheap second-hand scsi card for it.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Wed 6 Oct 2010, 14:24, closed)

Pah - kids
You don't know you're born!

I had to make do with 80k 8in Floppy Discs in my day.

I could barely believe my luck when I could get 1.44mb on a *tiny* little disc.
(dchurch bah, Thu 7 Oct 2010, 7:58, closed)