I ordered a Seagate 1TB drive (1000GB). It's not the largest capacity drive available, and I don't need even that much, but for the cost per gigabyte it was easily the best bargain.
Speaking of cost per gigabyte, I threw my hard drive purchases onto a chart (or the ones I have receipts for anyway) to see the progression of prices over the years. Click to enlarge.
It's on a logarithmic scale and looks fairly straight. Of course, being a log scale, any minor crookedness can mean major deviation. Take the period around 2000... doesn't fit the pattern at all. That happens to be when the dot-com bubble burst.
Also note the lack of data between 1996 and 2000... no receipts :(.
So what pattern am I talking about? Since around 2002, the cost per GB seems to halve every 18 months. That's about the same as dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years.
Somewhat relatedly, there once was this guy named Gordon Moore. Okay, he's still alive. He co-founded Intel. And 44 years ago he came up with Moore's Law, which initially predicted that the number of transistors that can be crammed onto an integrated circuit doubles every year. A decade later he altered his prediction to doubling every 2 years. Combined with other improvements beyond simply better cramming, performance of integrated circuits seems to double every 18 months.
The cost per gig during the dot-com craze was halving every year, possibly due to inordinate amounts of money going to R&D. But that obviously didn't last. If current trends continue, we'll be able to buy a 10TB hard drive for $100 before 2014. Place your bets.
Ooh and I look forward to 1PB drives before I'm 45. Let's just hope they're not the same big clunky noisy failure-prone heaters we have today.
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