Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Hard Disc Prices

(From here via here)

$200 a megabyte was something to crow about circa 1985 or so. Most consumer level computers used only floppy drive storage, which was a big step up from using cassette tapes. The fancy IBM PS/2s were using the shiny new 3.5" floppies, which held an amazing 720Kb per disc.

By about ten years or so later, the hard drive price had dropped to less than a dollar a megabyte.

Now, $200, unadjusted for inflation, will buy two two-terabyte hard drives. Which is roughly .005 cents per megabyte.
on or about

2 comments:

  1. Yogi11/02/2010 7:57 PM

    Yep. Just bought a NAS for our office, 14 TB of Seagate goodness in a 14" square box, gigabit Ethernet, etc etc for under $3K. More storage than existed in the west in 1969, when I saw my first IBM 360( I think that's what it was, I was all of 12 at the time)
    Simply amazing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eck!11/02/2010 9:21 PM

    Actually that drive pictured is circa 1979ish and at 4 or 8mb was a $3500 (1980 dollars) for the drive and the much needed (and expensive) controller.

    MY first hard drive was the new ST506 (5.25 inch full height 4" and 5MB) and about $1000 for the drive and controller (about 500 each!). In late 1981 that was the bleeding edge (and bleeding purse!). The upside is both the drive and the controller are still functional nearly 30 years later!

    None of that was plug and play. My first Drive took a hour to bolt in and hook up, plus several weeks to rewrite the BIOS to use it.

    Note to newbies, the IBM PC had not been invented at the time I made that purchase.

    Eck!

    ReplyDelete

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