Minecraft hard drive gets a 4 KB upgrade

So you've probably heard of the crazy and almost unbelievable project that brought a 1 KB hard drive into Minecraft's build-anything-you-want world. If you've been impressed with that, your jaw might just drop on this one. A new group, represented by a The0JJ in Imgur, has posted what they are claiming as their own Minecraft HDD, this time with an expanded capacity of 4 KB.

Naturally, the design for this new hard drive is exponentially, figuratively and literally since we're dealing with powers of 2, more complex than the previous one. We'll let you do the computation on your own, but you can simply imagine the work that it would take to cram four of that 1 KB hard drive into a similar space. You could, of course, try to take up more land area, but like in real world physics, that would also have a negative impact on performance even in this blocky world.

But this SFT (Super Fun Time, it seems, a Minecraft community) HDD goes above and beyond just a hard drive. They have practically reimplemented a very crude computer in Minecraft. There is a HDD controller that manages all the reads and writes, more complicated than the simple four-sided room of the previous 1 KB drive. They've even added a CPU that has its own interrupt mechanism and buses to carry data to and from the drive. The result? A system that looks no different from a huge metropolis, which is not really an inaccurate description of how a real-life computer would look like, with some imagination of course.

These amazing and sometimes utterly insane feats can make one wonder about the entire point of the exercise. Is it fun to build a complex megastructure like that? How many man-hours have been put into that project? But perhaps more importantly, will they ever reach 1 MB? It's still a long way from this, of course, but if this trend continues, we might very well see 32 and 64 KB drives in Minecraft really soon. But then, they'd probably need a really big map.

VIA: Imgur