Doing business with a startup

A dozen years ago, I worked for a startup storage company for a couple of years. My primary job was documentation manager, but I also handled a number of tasks related to the web site and to customer service. One day, I received this message, sent to the company's general information account:















The product that the customer was waiting for was a 100GB file server. It was one of the fastest things on the market at the time and went for about $100K. Today, you'd have to work a bit to find a 100GB storage device; most are much larger. You can find a 1TB disk for $250-300. (A terabyte (TB) is 1000 GB.) The old system was a RAID-5 configuration, which provided redundancy in the case of disk errors. It was also limited to 10,000 files because of the limited memory for names. My desktop system now has more than 700,000 files and it's not even breathing hard.