Tracking the astounding pace of digital storage

Ivan Smith maintains a page tracking the price of digital storage over the years. This is one of technology’s least appreciated growth stories — we hear a lot about Moore’s Law and the doubling of processing capacity, but storage-density’s growth makes the pace of processor improvements look glacial. Every now and then I realize that the 32GB SD card in my camera costs less than the 16k memory upgrade I put in my Apple ][+ in 1980, even without accounting for inflation, and I am croggled. Here are David Isenberg’s benchmarks, calculated from Smith’s records:

YEAR — Price of a Gigabyte

1981 — $300,000
1987 — $50,000
1990 — $10,000
1994 — $1000
1997 — $100
2000 — $10
2004 — $1
2010 — $0.10

It would be interesting to do the same chart for a megabyte — you’d go from six figures to fractional pennies in a damned short period.

Cost of
Hard Drive Storage Space

(via Isen.blog)