Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte

Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.

Comments

it's all relative

[jpsst34]

I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.

And at the same time, our storage needs are 2^10 times as large due to 10^3 more data, 10^3 more illicit mp3's, 10^3 more pr0n, 10^3 more overhead in a microsoft binary document format, etc., etc., etc.

Re:it's all relative

[Duds]

True, but we may have reached a slight plateau.

Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.

Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.

I mean, the 40MB drive I had just over a decade ago, no music, no video. And that's what's driving it.

Unless someone finds a huge new use for space (delete microsoft joke) then maybe it'll at least slow.

course it won't stop immediately. But Music, then Video drove expansion in size. What NEW is coming along to do that?

Now if only they were as reliable...

[evilpenguin]

I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.

So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.

Re:Now if only they were as reliable...

[GauteL]

That is something you can only say if the data is not valuable to you.

In a business, saving $140 over three years for choosing the cheaper drive is going to make you look very stupid when that drive fails.

One single extra day of lost work for one single employee might very well cost more than what you saved.

Simple maths? I don't think so.

Re:Those were the days

[cdipierr]

They don't exist anymore because there's no money in it for the manufacturers. The costs to create a 40GB drive (not to mention packaging and shipping) is likely only a few $$$ less than producing a 120GB drive. Since the 120 sells for twice as much, it obviously makes sense to promote those.

With that said, you can still get 20, 30 & 40 GB drives w/o much of a problem, just not at $1/GB.

Re:Those were the days

[crow]

Much of the price of the drive is independent of capacity. The additional platters and heads for high-capacity drives are significant, but so are the electronics and motors that are identical in 40G and 250G drives.

Hence, the cheapest $/byte drives to manufacture are the highest capacity drives. However the highest capacity drives are often sold at a premium, leaving the best price point somewhere in the middle.

Re:Those were the days

[stratjakt]

They stop producing them as demand dries up. If their production line is churning out 40 gig platters, the drives are built with 40 gig platters. If they had to open a new factory every time they want to make a bigger platter, they wouldnt be 1$/gig - and legacy drives would cost just as much to make as ever.

It's like chip fabs - where are the new 486dx's for me to build cheap routers out of?

Newer XBoxes are shipping with 20gig drives, even though they only partition and use 8. 8 gig drives just dont exist, 20 gigs is the cheapest option.

Now quit fighting progress. I like my 120 giggers.

Re:$1/TB?

[Dynedain]

Even if you ripped DVD's into VOB's ... you'd still need to rip over 100 to justify even 1 TB

Did you know that DVDs only have a resolution of 720x400 (16:9 proportions) and that the maximum resolution of HDTV is 1920x1080?

Thats 7.2 times as many pixels.....and we are still talking compressed data here (VOB is MPEG encoded).

If in the future we switch to uncompressed data (which would be a good thing) we are definately going to need TB drives.

And what if the industry decides to move to 60fps instead of the traditional 24fps for film and 30fps for TV? Double the frames, double the data.

Trust me, we'll need it.

Re:Expands to fill..

[peterpi]

If you measure in dollars-spent-on-space instead of space itself, Windows gets smaller and smaller with every release.

But you didn't want to hear that.