Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/235024900/Unit-6-Analysis-1-Memory-Cost
Now think about the amount of storage we will have 45 years from now.
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Way we’re currently headed, the non-oligarchs will be back to clay tablets.
Owning a 20MB hard drive for my Atari ST was still THE DREAM in 1989.
Couldn’t afford it, though, so it was 720kB floppy discs until 1996, when I got my first PC.
I had one for my ST. It came in a box the size of a shoebox. If I recall, I paid $500 for it and a colour monitor. It was loaded with a bunch of games cracked by “The Blade Runners”.
The drive died at one point but I saved the box because it was so cool. I thought about loading it with a handful of backup drives.
Nah, transistors can’t get much smaller than they already are. Only new fabs and increasing production capacity can really lower prices at this point (and the AI bubble bursting), it’s not going to be so much about technology getting exponentially better like it was in previous decades
And every step of the way, some assholes idiots inspired society to think “we will never need more than this”
Probably going to cost that again soon if AI keeps eating the world.
Nice try, AI companies!
It’s not clear if the original adjusted for inflation. $5000 in todays money is $21,500
26 megabytes…who will ever need that much.
I know, right? I had a 20 MB drive on my Amiga. Plenty.
don’t worry, at this rate we’ll be back to that pricing in no time…
Only for SSDs. HDDs are under $100 for 2TB drives. Economy of scale plus lower demand makes those physical drives super cheap.
i believe datacenter demand is driving up HDD prices too though to a lesser extent
Datacenter demand is just the excuse to jack and fix prices.
unfortunately true
Yep! Also, some people don’t care about the speed of an HDD, as long as it has a ton of storage.
$100 for 2TB is terrible though, ideally we get 1TB or more per $5
I bought 4 4tb HDDs for $500 total last year, went to buy a spare last month and they’re $250 each now. So no. Not even a little bit true.
You better look again, all my shit has went up.
super cheap
That’s what a slim 2.5" (so, fairly cutting-edge tech) 2TB cost almost 10 years ago, and a couple of years later the same drive was around $70. This isn’t some kind of amazing deal in 2026.
Uh wrong. The drive’s I Bought last year have more than doubled. In price. Hdds not ssd. Insanity.
Yeah about that…
All hard drives, including HDD’s have at least gone up a bit. But, everybody prefers SSD’s, so obviously those will be higher. People install the OS on the SSD then use a huge HDD to install the games on.
Now look at 10TB drives.
You checked Walmart for those? Might be a decent price if they actually have them in stock.
With “waiting for” they mean probably the slow read/write speed.
Hard disks were blazing fast compared to floppies.
They still are.
Agree, and it was noisy as fuck.
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It really is insane that 1TB micro SD cards exist now
Yes, it is:
Yeah but your crypto was safe, brah.
It’s funny to see cost per GB on the right. Back in 1980, most people didn’t even know what a Gigabyte might be.
Around 2000 I remember a guy at the computer store telling me that 20 gigs was a ton and how would I even use it? Well, one pirated 700 Meg movie at a time is how (most pirate copies tried to keep movies to 700 mb so they’d fit on a burned cd)
I always chuckle thinking about taking a 1TB Micro SD back in time and watching people’s heads explode.
I remember being in college in the very early 90s and a friend got a machine with 2 2gb hard drives and wondering what he was going to do with all that space. Now I have a NAS at home with something like 100TB and it’s almost 75% full.
Ahoy, matey! 🤣
Local storage will be illegal in 45 years.
I didn’t think about that, “you’ll own nothing and be happy” plan…
And we’ll probably have less cloud storage than we do now
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That ain’t nowhere near enough to store the nudes your mom sent me.
“yer mom has so many sex toys we call her Anal Fissure Price” -Shoresy.
