Hard drive gig - what you need to know
Posted by Scout on January 20, 2010
In 1980, a 26MB drive would cost you $5,000, equivalent to $193,000 per hard drive gig (1GB=1000MB). Now, 30 years later, a 1TB drive can be yours for less than $100, which puts the cost per hard drive gig down to under $0.10 (1TB=1000GB). Of course, back in the 80’s, the thought of selling GBs to consumers was probably deemed ridiculous. Today, personal movie collections could gobble up several terabytes in a snap.
As we have seen, capacity has sky-rocketed while prices have taken a big plunge, but just how low can it go?
mKomo has an great article on the history of storage prices containing a table of prices from 1980-2009. From these data, a formula for estimating the cost hard drive gig on any given year was obtained:
Using this, we get a value for the year 2020 - a decade from now - of roughly $0.0002/GB . That means 1TB would cost $0.20, 100TB about $20, and assuming technology has enabled us to reach the capacity, 1PB (1petabyte = 1000TB) would be available for $200. What on earth would we need it for? Lots and lots of 3D movies, perhaps.
Another estimate, this time more subdued, is offered by Seagate’s former Chief Technology Officer Mark Kryder. In a paper, he wrote that by 2020, up to 14TB can be fitted to a 2-plate 2.5-inch disk drive, and it would cost $40. Assuming that 3.5-inch drives at that time would have twice the capacity for the same price, then we could hope for 28TB for $40, or $0.0014. This is 7x more expensive than what we earlier predicted, but still quite cheap.
By 2020, the scenario will probably be something in between, with technological breakthroughs pushing capacity up, and economic realities keeping the prices from falling too fast too soon. The important take away from this is not that film buffs will have cheap and virtually unlimited storage someday soon, but that it’s indicative of the price decline for other computer parts. Ten years from now, how cheap will netbooks be? How much easier would it be to equipt our public schools with adequate computer facilities?
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