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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.
Leet, now I won't feel so bad knowning that my swap space is only worth a buck.
Trolling is a art,
1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year. For years, hard disk drives were confined to mainframe and minicomputer installations. Vast "disk farms" of giant 14- and 8-inch drives costing tens of thousands of dollars each whirred away in the air conditioned isolation of corporate data centers.
Bah! You kids with your newfangled hard drives! Why, in my day, we worked with ferro-magnetic drives. Sure, the magnets were big, and they were powerful, and dammit if you didn't get a nice buzz while working around these things. That was the way it was, AND we liked it!
AND I had to walk uphill! Twice! In the snow! Buzzed out of my mind!
/.'s 10 Millionth
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?
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.
Wow, this is amazing if you've been around for a while.
My first hard drive was 105MB (that's mega, not giga) and cost $600. Of course, that included the SCSI interface for the Atari ST I was hooking it to.
The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
Did anyone actually go look at the drive listed? It's a 5400 rpm drive. My grandma can remember information faster than that.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks
Well yes, the prices have dropped immensly indeed - however it might be worth considering that the basic concept of physical storage has not changed a bit. We are able to squeeze more bits into each square millimeter, but access speed has maybe changed by a factor of 50 or so (I'm guessing here, so please correct me). At the same time, processor speeds have aptly doubled in speed every 18 months or so.
I do appreciate cheap mass storage on my desktop, don't get me wrong, but I really long for things like static memory or holographic storage devices. And the use of spinning copper disks is not exactly power efficient either - so on the laptop front, new storage technologies could make a big difference.
The first hard drive I bought cost me $500.
It was a 10 MByte (yes, that's mega) Seagate. Full height 5 1/4 (hint, a CD drive is half height).
I partitioned it into 4 drives:
C: 1M - DOS (V 2.0 !)
D: 4M - Applications
E: 4M - Data
F: 1M - Testing
Mind you after struggling with two 5 1/4 floppy drives, this was heaven.
I still have it, after all, where could I possibly sell it?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Retail stores are a very good place for HD's. You will often find BestBuy/CompUSA/Staples/CircuitCity/OfficeMax etc will have lower prices on HD's then what is at pricewatch, local computer stores, and even regional computer expos. More then likely you get a retail drive in a box with full warranty (mainly 1 year now) and maybe even a UDMA cable and 5.25 adapters. Most mail ordered I've seen are OEM and 30 days at best. CDRW's are the same way.
Sometimes you may have to deal with a rebate to get the good deal but at least one of the above retailers has one good deal a week. Not sure if SalesCircular covers all areas of the US but it is a good place to scope out retailers sale prices for a week.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Bzzzt.
You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yeah, but by then, Super Windows XP Pro Ultimate Championship Edition will be out, will have backwards compatibility to all prior 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit architectures, take 8 solar days to load, require 800 terabytes to install, and the neuro-holographic interface will crash regularly, wiping out more data than a human being can process in a lifetime, and throwing people into neural shock. You'll die, but it will be illegal to have any negative feelings towards the occasion, because of the Digital Oblivion Mind-Control Act.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
Sometimes I scare myself...
--Dan
the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space
When virtual reality (fully 3d, immersed environments) start to appear and be used in the home, there'll be a need for this kind of storage. Combined with processor advances to do the massive crunches needed for such an interface/game/devetool/whatever... the average home user will finally have the ability to experience it.
Given the advances in OS engineering, i'd put the initial uses of this (at home) in six years or less.
I don't think we'll be at $1/TB for a decade though (10 years ago we were at $1000/GB). And I agree, we don't need storage space to be *quite* that low for VR itself to take off.
IMHO.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
if you could pick up a 40GB drive for $40, or a 20GB for $20, without having to fool with rebates. As it is, the cost of hard drives seems to be staying at around $100, almost regardless of capacity, limiting you in just how cheap a system you can build. Right now the most expensive item in a bottom feeder system is the HD. On Newegg you can build a minimal Duron system for:
20GB HD: $69
All-in-one mobo: $51
CPU: $31
Case: $28
128MB SDRAM: $22
CD-ROM: $19
Floppy: $8
Total: $228
If that 20GB drive were $20 instead, that would be only $179. Of course, there are reasons why the drive isn't $20, I'm just lamenting.
In this paper, dates were predicted for a megabyte per buck, a gigabyte per buck, and a terabyte per buck. I recall that this 1980 paper predicted a gigabyte per buck in 1999; pretty close!
Jonathan V. Post, "Quintillabit: Parameters of a Hyperlarge Database", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Very Large Databases,
Montreal, Canada, 1-3 October 1980
By the way, Post named in this article the "Shannon" = 1 mole of bits = 6.02 x 10^23 bits.
Now THAT's a big memory!