Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust

Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from Wired Magazine looks at storage with a new angle. 'Right now I am sitting in front of a whirring 60-gigabyte hard disk that cost less than $100. Do the math: If back then 10 megabytes cost $1,000, then 60 gigabytes would have cost x, where x = $6,000,000 and "back then" = 18 years ago. I'm sitting in front of $6,000,000 worth of mass storage, measured at mid-1980s prices. We have Moore's law for microprocessors. But who's coined a law for hard disks? In mass storage we have seen a 60,000-fold fall in price -- more than a dozen times the force of Moore's law.' DeLong also looks at a non-distant future when a $100 mass storage device will hold a full terabyte. He also thinks that with disk space becoming cheaper and cheaper, we'll be tempted to archive everything about ourselves, including pictures and videos. This is in fact the goal of the Gordon's Bell project, MyLifeBits. You can learn more about the MyLifeBits project by reading this NewsFactor Network article. Check this column for more details."