The best things are found by surprise. I’ve been wanting a history of storage capacities and costs and today I found a link to “Cost of Hard Drive Space“. Never mind that it is in a fairly raw format and only goes to 2004. It clearly shows where we have been and implies where we are going.
Along the lines of projection, read “What would you do with a 500,000,000,000 GB hard drive?” That’s what you should expect to have fifty years from now based on the current growth rate. By the year 2066, this kind of storage capacity should be common place (in theory). What is most interesting is that this one drive could store the entire capacity of storage in the world and still have 1/3 leftover.
Lately, and very informally, I’ve noted that hard drive storage in Australia costs about $1 per GB. Meanwhile, flash memory costs about $10 per GB. Very unscientific but a pretty good rule of thumb. If flash can surpass the value of hard drives, then that would cause a transition to flash based drives for most everything. This ignores flash weaknesses that most likely would be solved by then.
This post is really just an excuse to share some valuable data. Perhaps I’ll chart some of this later to see where a terabyte crosses over the $1 mark.
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