Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/235024900/Unit-6-Analysis-1-Memory-Cost
Now think about the amount of storage we will have 45 years from now.
Nah, transistors can’t get much smaller than they already are. Only new fabs and increasing production capacity can really lower prices at this point (and the AI bubble bursting), it’s not going to be so much about technology getting exponentially better like it was in previous decades
And every step of the way, some assholes idiots inspired society to think “we will never need more than this”
Probably going to cost that again soon if AI keeps eating the world.
Nice try, AI companies!
It’s not clear if the original adjusted for inflation. $5000 in todays money is $21,500
26 megabytes…who will ever need that much.
I know, right? I had a 20 MB drive on my Amiga. Plenty.
With “waiting for” they mean probably the slow read/write speed.
Hard disks were blazing fast compared to floppies.
They still are.
Agree, and it was noisy as fuck.
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don’t worry, at this rate we’ll be back to that pricing in no time…
Only for SSDs. HDDs are under $100 for 2TB drives. Economy of scale plus lower demand makes those physical drives super cheap.
$100 for 2TB is terrible though, ideally we get 1TB or more per $5
i believe datacenter demand is driving up HDD prices too though to a lesser extent
Datacenter demand is just the excuse to jack and fix prices.
unfortunately true
Yep! Also, some people don’t care about the speed of an HDD, as long as it has a ton of storage.
I bought 4 4tb HDDs for $500 total last year, went to buy a spare last month and they’re $250 each now. So no. Not even a little bit true.
You better look again, all my shit has went up.
super cheap
That’s what a slim 2.5" (so, fairly cutting-edge tech) 2TB cost almost 10 years ago, and a couple of years later the same drive was around $70. This isn’t some kind of amazing deal in 2026.
Uh wrong. The drive’s I Bought last year have more than doubled. In price. Hdds not ssd. Insanity.
Yeah about that…
All hard drives, including HDD’s have at least gone up a bit. But, everybody prefers SSD’s, so obviously those will be higher. People install the OS on the SSD then use a huge HDD to install the games on.
Now look at 10TB drives.
You checked Walmart for those? Might be a decent price if they actually have them in stock.
It’s funny to see cost per GB on the right. Back in 1980, most people didn’t even know what a Gigabyte might be.
Around 2000 I remember a guy at the computer store telling me that 20 gigs was a ton and how would I even use it? Well, one pirated 700 Meg movie at a time is how (most pirate copies tried to keep movies to 700 mb so they’d fit on a burned cd)
I always chuckle thinking about taking a 1TB Micro SD back in time and watching people’s heads explode.
I remember being in college in the very early 90s and a friend got a machine with 2 2gb hard drives and wondering what he was going to do with all that space. Now I have a NAS at home with something like 100TB and it’s almost 75% full.
Ahoy, matey! 🤣
It really is insane that 1TB micro SD cards exist now
Yes, it is:
Yeah but your crypto was safe, brah.
That ain’t nowhere near enough to store the nudes your mom sent me.
Local storage will be illegal in 45 years.
I didn’t think about that, “you’ll own nothing and be happy” plan…
And we’ll probably have less cloud storage than we do now
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My second computer had a 20 MB HDD and it was wonderful to have soooo much space compared to the previous computer which had no HDD and 3 floppy drives.
Then a year later I added a second 20 MB HDD and was absolutely swimming in space.
Back then a ‘large’ app was 100 KB. You’d spend all day writing code and produce a 13 KB file.
I can spend all day writing code and end up a couple kB lighter.
I remember my parents taking us to the Gateway store, and the guy who helped us said something along the lines of “This PC has 12 gigs; you’ll never run out of space!”
Napster hit the scene within a few months. Started getting “low disk space!” warnings real quick.
Musta been tough not having any phone line access for weeks, it’d take ages for gigs to fill up at 3-4kb/s!
It was a wild ride lol.
All the oldies flocking here to tell everyone about how cool their tiny hard drives were.
Hi, I had a 25mb hard drive and it was awesome. Technology!
Hi, I don’t remember the size of my first HDD, I guess about 40 MB. Was a pretty big boy, filling a whole 5.25 " slot. What I remember most about it, was that my father told me to always park it.
Parking drive heads is indeed the term for the drive moving them off the platter, which it does when cleanly powered down to protect the platter.
searches
Apparently, though I wasn’t aware of this until now, some DOS hard drives required manual parking by the user.
Hard drives have read/write heads which fly above the spinning disks when the drive is powered. When power is removed, the heads no longer fly… For a long time now, the arms which hold the heads have been designed to “auto-park” the heads away from the disks’ surface, or over a safe “landing zone”, when they lose power¹, but early (up to the mid 80s) hard drives didn’t have this feature, so their heads would land on the disk surface, which could sometimes damage the surface.
So early PCs had a PARK command which would park the heads away from the disk surface. Typically, this would attempt to move the heads past the last “official” cylinder (over an “engineering cylinder” on MFM and RLL drives), or, starting with ATs, use the landing zone specified in the BIOS drive parameter table (accessed using the vectors stored at interrupts 0x41 and 0x46). You can see one such implementation in Roedy Green’s PARK which comes with source code, or in Jim Leonard’s disassembly of SpinRite’s PARK.
On PCs with auto-parking heads, it was safe to wait for the DOS command prompt, and the lights to switch off: COMMAND.COM ensures that I/O is finished before it displays the command prompt (and in-memory disk caches are supposed to honour that too).
(In fact, this feature is what allows Roedy Green’s PARK to work too: you’d wait for the command prompt, so there’s no outstanding I/O, then run PARK, which would be loaded from disk, then run with no I/O apart from parking the heads, then either loop forever or return to the command prompt which would normally not result in any I/O either, so the heads would remain safely parked. SpinRite’s PARK waits for the user to press a key, so the user can power the computer off without pressing a key and thus ensure there’s no untoward I/O.)
New PCs in 1994 wouldn’t need this, but it was common for schools to have very old computers, and an early PC requiring PARK wouldn’t be unheard of. Old habits die hard too, so it’s possible that the advice to run PARK was kept alive long after it stopped being relevant, but that would have involved copying the PARK command since it was system-specific and not part of DOS.
If I remember correctly, IDE drives never needed PARK, so you’d only find it on PCs equipped with pre-IDE drives (commonly referred to as MFM or RLL drives).
I’m not sure what kind of drive it was. I remember using the park command in DOS but it’s possible it wasn’t actually necessary. I guess my father had experience with earlier drives and just assumed it was good practice. I also remember the park command caused some audible noise from the HDD. Probably some whirring and a click but I’m not sure about this.
