Amazing Gains in Digital Storage Technology

by on January 17, 2007 · 6 comments

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal has a fun piece in today’s paper about the amazing gains that have been made in the field of digital storage technology. He notes that we reached another amazing milestone in the computing business with the annoucement of several terabyte-capacity disk drives from Hitachi, Seagate and others. (I saw some of these at CES this year. Very cool stuff.) The last time we reached a major storage milestone like this, he points out, was back in 1991 when we crossed the gigabyte threshold.

I’ll never forget when those first 1-gig drives came out how I thought to myself “Geez, who in the hell would ever need that much capacity?” What an idiot I was. Of course, I could not have envisioned the explosion of so much downloadable digital content, the rise of digital photography / camcorders, and the coming of storable HD video. I recently maxed out an old 100-gig hard drive on a PC at my house and started stacking external hard drives to store all my digital content. And my wife and I have been holding off on upgrading to an HD camcorder because we fear we don’t have enough storage space for all the home movies of the kids.

But hopefully that will now change for me. As Gomes points out, back when those old 1-gig drives where announced, they were priced in the $2000 range. By contrast, the new 1-terabyte drives are hitting the market at just $400 bucks. This means that, on a cost-per-byte basis, the old 1-gig models were 5,000 times as expensive as the newer models.

You gotta love capitalism!

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About Adam Thierer

Adam Thierer is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He previously served as President of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, as Director of Telecommunications Studies at the Cato Institute, and as a Fellow in Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation. He is the author or editor of six books on technology and media policy and also writes a weekly column for Forbes called "Technologies of Freedom." Thierer earned his bachelor's degree in political science and journalism at Indiana University and received his master's degree in international business management and trade theory at the University of Maryland. His passions in life (besides technology and liberty, of course) are fast cars, fine cigars, and good beer.

Read more articles by Adam Thierer.

  • Walter E. Wallis

    My first hard drive, 2.5 MB, cost $2200 and took over 2 years to fill up.

  • Walter E. Wallis

    My first hard drive, 2.5 MB, cost $2200 and took over 2 years to fill up.

  • http://www.manifestdensity.net tom

    I feel bad for storage researchers — sounds like we’re only counting milestones every three orders of magnitude. That’s a pretty high bar.

    This post is appropriate, since just yesterday the first HD-DVD appeared on BitTorrent, and with it the next frontier in consumer storage needs. Still, HD video only represents a one OOM (or so) increase in size. We’re pretty close to getting our home theaters’ bandwidth to match our optic nerves’. Once that’s accomplished I can’t think of the next major consumer bandwidth application that we’re likely to see — until immersive 3D environments and/or Smell-O-Vision arrive, anyway. Either way, it seems likely that the current paradigm of magnetic storage technology is going to be able to be pushed beyond consumer needs for a lengthy period.

  • http://www.manifestdensity.net tom

    I feel bad for storage researchers — sounds like we’re only counting milestones every three orders of magnitude. That’s a pretty high bar.

    This post is appropriate, since just yesterday the first HD-DVD appeared on BitTorrent, and with it the next frontier in consumer storage needs. Still, HD video only represents a one OOM (or so) increase in size. We’re pretty close to getting our home theaters’ bandwidth to match our optic nerves’. Once that’s accomplished I can’t think of the next major consumer bandwidth application that we’re likely to see — until immersive 3D environments and/or Smell-O-Vision arrive, anyway. Either way, it seems likely that the current paradigm of magnetic storage technology is going to be able to be pushed beyond consumer needs for a lengthy period.

  • http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/ Amanda

    Wow, terabyte hard drives. I remember when that was crazy NSA stuff.

    When I got my first job out of college, in 2003, I was entrusted with a 2GB USB thumb drive. I was pretty impressed that something so small could store so much, and looked it up to see how much it was worth – some 600 bucks. Last month I got a 1GB thumb drive for free (well, retail was $55 but there was a rebate). Even better was when I saw 32MB thumb drives in the Target checkout lane – next to the gum – for 5 dollars.

    Good stuff.

  • http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/ Amanda

    Wow, terabyte hard drives. I remember when that was crazy NSA stuff.

    When I got my first job out of college, in 2003, I was entrusted with a 2GB USB thumb drive. I was pretty impressed that something so small could store so much, and looked it up to see how much it was worth – some 600 bucks. Last month I got a 1GB thumb drive for free (well, retail was $55 but there was a rebate). Even better was when I saw 32MB thumb drives in the Target checkout lane – next to the gum – for 5 dollars.

    Good stuff.

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