Hard drive storage keeps getting cheaper while the drives keep getting bigger. You can buy between 80 and 160 Gigabytes of storage for around $70 these days, depending on if you want to be bothered with filing rebates, and 300GB will only set you back $222 - $250 bucks. For those of you who aren’t computer geeks a terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes. So we’re about a third of the way there already and makes the $70 price by 2008 not at all unreasonable.
I found out about this over at Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka. Danny wrote an entry about it after being asked by a friend about the future cost of a petabyte of storage.
A friend wrote asking me if a petabyte would be an affordable amount of disk storage in five years time. Blowed if I know, but in scrabbling to answer, I did find this great projection of the next twenty years of magnetic storage.
Oh, in case you’re wondering, a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes or 1,048,576 gigabytes and will still cost $70,000 in 2008. No small chunk of change, but imagine how much porn family pictures from your digital camera you could store on that. And who knows? With games just starting to eat up multiple gigabytes each—Far Cry requires 4 gigabytes, Unreal Tournament 2004 asks for at least 5.5GB, while Half-Life 2 is estimated to require between 2.5GB and 4GB of room and Doom III is rumored to gobble upwards of 6GB—we may just need a petabyte worth of storage by 2008.
Posted on 07/15/2004 at 03:07 PM 
Posted on 07/19/2004 at 04:21 AM 
Posted on 08/10/2007 at 04:20 AM 
That is amazing. I still remember shelling out around $300 for a 20MB hard drive.
Bring on the Yottabyte drives. Peta, exa, zeta, and yotta. Holodecks are in aisle three.