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.
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.
Did someone say YATTA?!?
I still have a 40meg that cost me $800! And that was a bargain price!
I keep it in a box along with some other museum pieces; old Macs, Vic20, TRS80 etc.
Wish I still had my old CPM machine – Zork is best played on the old monochrome green.
Les – Don’t ever do that again. We will restart the circumcision thread. That’s just evil. Spocko must be rubbing off on you.
Have a look at SIMH. Between the Altair emulator and a window color scheme you’ll get pretty close.
My dad (who’se a freelance prorammer) bought a 2 meg (yes, megabyte!) drive long time ago for about 1000$.
2 megs? Couldn’t fit the install screen for some OS on that these days.
What do you mean? That’s a great song! How can you watch that and not be ga… er… happy??
Thanks elwedriddsche. Ah, the good ol’ days.
PS. Yatta Yatta Yatta Yatta Yatta Yatta Yatta …
Spocko, not to forget The Unofficial CP/M Web site
Sorry this picture’s a little crappy, being a scan off a pre-digital photo, but… the drive on the right is a 220mb drive weighing 22 lbs and costing (I am told) around $8k. It had eight platters, 14 heads, and took about 45 seconds to spin up to full speed. I had a lot of fun taking it apart, and one of the platters makes a great mirror – it’s so flat you can reflect sunlight for several blocks. At left is a 1gb laptop drive that cost about $200 new. (of course one that size could be 60g now) At far left is a quarter.
I had a petabyte me once. That shit hurt.
rimshot please.
Hey Brooks, what did you do to get bitten by one of those PETA guys? I know they can be pretty rabid, but…
Dang Brooks. Be careful. I’ve read about those ‘pedaguise’. I understand they’re just priests in plain clothes.
It didn’t bite me…there.
thats pretty cool..i like this site..
Just for the record
1 bit = a binary digit
8 bits = 1 byte
1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte
1000 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
1000 megabytes = 1 gigabyte
1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte
1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte
1000 petabytes = 1 exabyte
1000 exabytes = 1 zettabyte
1000 zettabytes = 1 yottabyte
1000 yottabytes = 1 brontobyte
1000 brontobytes = more than any one will ever use befor the end of the world
and thats all i know
i wonder if a brontobyte has passed through the interconected servers know as the web (fuckin WAN)
im gunna pay the cost to get a brontobyte when im old and wrinkely, passing it down generation to generation w/o haveing to del anything (that is saying that it doesnt die befor then :\)
Wait, i just heard tell of a nisababyte being 1000 brontobytes and a Zotzabyte = 1000 nisababytes
maybe just a rumor, not sure
lol
1 nisabyte is = to 8000000000000000000000000000000 bits
yeah, i agree with you.
Eschabyte = 10^1221
1000 eschabytes = 1 jettobyte
1000 jettobytes = 1 gyrobyte
1000 gyrobytes = 1 ferribyte
1000 ferribytes = 1 arobyte
1000 arobytes = 1 urubyte
thats all i know now……
So this was originally posted back in July of 2004. It’s September 2009 now, some five years later, and 1TB hard drives regularly go for $75 and have for quite awhile now. Not only that, but 1.5TB’s are just a bit more at around $100 (and you can often find them on sale for less) and 2TB drives are starting to hit the market for around $180.
It’s not uncommon to see folks with anywhere between 2 and 6TB of storage on their home networks these days. Home NAS devices are quite common place as well.
Amazing what a difference five years makes, eh?