Hard drive costs now under 10 cents per MB
Found on The Inquirer on Friday, 24 September 2004
John Fox from Hitachi Storage kicked off his presentation here by contrasting the price of storage when hard drives first appeared with the costs now.
The first hard drive in 1956 was the IBM 305 RAMAC, and cost $10,000 per MB – it had a capacity of 5MB.
But now the cost, Fox said, is something under 10 cents per MB and that he said, is a retail figure, including tax.
He said that the 3.5-inch drive factor is decreasing, and the real growth is in the 2.5-inch notebook. The car and the handheld consumer electronic markets are the additional spice, he said, that will help grow the market. Automotive vendors are adding hard drives and flat panel screens into the car.
Although it is nice that harddrives are getting cheaper and cheaper, they also seem to get less and less reliable. I have so many troubles with harddrives that I can't rely on them completely and therefore keep copies of important data on several drives.