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Remember when everything you needed fit into a bunch of nifty floppy disks? (yes, I’m that old) What about the first time you got a hard disk?
Matt Komorowski was lucky enough to get his first computer during the early 1990s—which came with a 30GB hard disk—and he was ” wondering how I could possibly fill all 30 megabytes of hard drive space, even if I had a thousand years.” now we know how short-sighted that supposition was. Like Matt, I’m looking to buy a 1 terabyte hard disk soon, probably for or with my next computer, as it takes only months for me to cause low disk space warnings on a computer with a 500GB hard drive.
Fortunately, upgrading your hard drive storage capacity isn’t really an expensive proposition, as evidenced by the hard of work Komorowski. He simply plotted the prices of hard disks from 1980 to this year, creating a graph that tracked the downward progress of the dollar cost per gigabyte. The exercise revealed that “space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months”, meaning Moore’s law is getting beat in the world of hard drive storage. Some highlights of Komorowski’s history:
| Date | Drive info | Size | Cost | $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 1980 | Morrow Systems | 26MB | $5,000.00 | $193,000.00 |
| March 1989 | Western Digital | 40MB | $1,199.00 | $36,000.00 |
| February 12, 1999 | Quantum | 8GB | $299.99 | $43.10 |
| July 24, 2009 | HITACHI 0A38016 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s |
1TB | $74.99 | $0.07 |
Somewhere in that timeline is no doubt the $3398 10M hard disk.
$193,000 per gigabyte to 7 cents represents a cost decrease of nearly three-million percent! Yes, I may feel old thanks to the analogy that started this article, but at least I don’t have to spend too much on a 1 terabyte hard disk nowadays—even if that HITACHI hard drive currently costs $80 on NewEgg.com, not $75. Personally though, I’ll think I’ll shell out for the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s
. Though it’s currently more expensive at $95, I pretty much find Western Digital Drives much more reliable.
If a price decreases 100% it means the price has gone to zero. Therefore, the price of something cannot decrease 3 million percent. This is something you will learn when you get your GED.
If I recall correctly in 1980 300MB CDC drives were $15,000.
Your numbers are way off.
So, for 1TB Harddisk, it would cost about 192 Million USD
but today, it is less than 100 USD.
Amazing.
“Matt Komorowski was lucky enough to get his first computer during the early 1990s—which came with a 30GB hard disk”
It’s amazing how “GB” just flows off your tongue – or off your fingers – nowadays. I assume the later mention of 30MB was the correct figure? Otherwise, using the above chart, his computer would have cost him around $1,000,000.
However interesting it is to compare cost per GB, I wonder how easy it would be to compare cost per file? Windows used to come on 7x 1.44MB floppy disks, and take around 10MB to install. Now, Windows 7 comes on one DVD, and takes over 1GB – a 100x increase. Similarly, a word processed document used to be barely larger than the amount of text inside. Nowadays, documents are commonly so large that they trip e-mail size limitations.
Are we still storing the same number of documents that we did 20 years ago? Probably we’re storing more. But 30,000 times more? Are we still running out of hard drive space as quickly as we did back then?
Well, I bought a 750GB Seagate Freeagent External Hard Drive for about $50 ($20 coupon) so my cost/GB was about $0.06. Granted this did involve coupons but there also was a price premium with the Seagate name (not sure if it was worth it).
I try not to buy any hard drives priced higher than $100 and I try to make sure the cost/GB is less than $0.10 while still buying from a reputable supplier (Seagate, WD only). It is hard to fill all these requirements as you can see.
932 days ago
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