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.
May 18th, 2006 at 10:27 am
I still have hundreds of floppies filled with .sea files for work - I have no current floppy drive, and the .sea’s won’t open under OS X… but I still have ‘em (and an ancient Mac clone I can resurrect under System 7 to maybe read ‘em if I had to).
May 18th, 2006 at 10:36 am
(Actually, if you drop an .sea file on Stuffit Expander, it’ll open (I’ve had to do that a lot.) Yeah, I went through and did this big transfer of all my old floppies, syquests, and zip disks—they fit comfortably on one DVD. I do have some Apple II floppies that have some writing I’d love to get off of them…on the other hand, late 70s/early 80s self-indulgent writing? Maybe not.
December 28th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
OK, it’s now Dec 28, 2006. On eBay, brand new 500gb drives retail for 179.99, therefore $179.99/476815MB = $0.00037, or about 60.5% of what you paid on May 18th, 2006. Assuming this was the day you bought it (close enough), then the cost of memory (and likely nearly all electronic technology) is dropping at about (1-0.605)/224 days, or 0.176% per day, and is, of course, accelerating. So, at the start of 2007, tech costs are plummeting at ~1% every 5.67 days, or 1.23%/week, or 64%/year. My guess is that by year-end 2007, it’ll be 0.5%/day.