Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte

Posted by timothy on from the inflection-points dept.

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.

5 of 715 comments (clear)

  1. it's all relative by jpsst34 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    --
    How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
    1. Re:it's all relative by Duds · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

  2. Now if only they were as reliable... by evilpenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Now if only they were as reliable... by GauteL · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:Expands to fill.. by peterpi · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.