Mega, giga, tera-driven.
Thursday, May 18th, 2006
I bought a 20MB (megabyte!) drive on October 23, 1985 for $1,942.50. That may well have represented the peak of my desperation to shell out for “the right tool for the right job”—my humble Mac Plus was starved for storage, I was filling up floppies as if they were going out of style, which, I guess, they were. 20MB represented an endless horizon of elbow room. Now it’s not fit to hang off of my keychain.
But that was, of course, not the end of my Quest for Storage. It’s almost too painful to do the math, but, all right, my outlay has plummeted from $97.12 per megabyte to $0.00061130581 per megabyte (the most recent half-terabyte drive stores 476,815.36 megabytes.)
| 1993-09-08 | 1GB drive | $923.00 |
| 1994-11-22 | 1.2GB Fujitsu drive | $680.00 |
| 1995-12-23 | 1GB drive (JPB) | $295.74 |
| 1998-01-10 | Fujitsu 9GB SCSI drive | $961.93 |
| 1999-01-16 | IBM 9GB drive | $533.93 |
| 2000-05-14 | Maxtor 61.4GB drive | $275.10 |
| 2000-10-04 | 10GB drive | $94.34 |
| 2001-05-10 | Maxtor 80GB drive | $220.25 |
| 2001-05-10 | IBM 20GB drive for laptop | $125.25 |
| 2003-04-04 | 120GB drive | $190.79 |
| 2004-03-18 | SATA 233GB drive | $207.98 |
| 2005-02-15 | USB2 300GB drive | $233.19 |
| 2006-04-04 | SATA 500GB drive | $291.48 |
Heck, they’re almost paying me to buy the drives now. And my G5 certainly appreciates the real estate…it creates files willy-nilly and fills up space as if it only cost six hundredths of a cent for a megabyte of storage.
