Cost of 1 gigabyte of storage over time

So 10€ for a Terrabyte? How? You can't compare mass-discounted stuff, like cloud, which additionally uses your data for tracking etc., to generate more money, with the consumer focused, single-item storage common a few years ago.
- Yeah apparently I just got ripped tf off with the ssd I just bought.
  Storage IS cheap these days, but 1c/GB is not true.
  
  pretty close, though. $99.99 for new 8tb seagate hdd is the lowest/gb i've seen in the last couple years from a major retailer.
  
  https://a.co/d/eLUC1DL
  .016 cents per gb. It's pretty close, but i can't really find anything lower and reliable.
- https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#sort=ppgb&page=1
- Refurbished 16TB+ HDDs are around that price range.
  If you want a new one its sadly twice as expensive.
  
  Often has exorbitant shipping + tax to germany, unfortunately, and once you want recertified ones, so more than a month or so of warranty, it's more expensive.
- I agree that cloud storage is a rental scheme and not comparable, but an old sata disk here is 240Gb for £24 which is equivalent to 10c per Gig. If you go back to abandoned formats like ide hard disks you may be able to get 0.01 per Gb.
  https://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb-wd-green-sata-m2-ssd-m2-2280-sata-iii-6gb-s-slc-nand-read-545mb-s-wd-ssd-dashboard
- The prices are adjusted for inflation.
- I checked Amazon and found some 12tb (HGST) and 18tb (MDD) drives for <$10/tb. WD and Seagate are a little over $10/tb, but not by much.
- 2TB for 20€:
  https://www.ebay.de/itm/356346610758?itmmeta=01JEGTZZB01X60WW9NT90AX12Q&hash=item52f7e9c446:g:Gx0AAOSwCWVnTgev
  1TB for free:
  https://www.terabox.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans
  
  Ok, used and probably unreliable or maybe already damaged may be a way to achieve that.
  And cloud where you data is just used for tracking and advertising (for) you isn't comparable to the local method, as I said.
  
  If we're gonna get nitpicky on this (which we might as well), we should include the cost of bandwidth when talking about the cloud. They offer the storage for free (theoretically), but it still costs you money to upload and download that data.
  I was just having a similar conversation with some people about the rapidly increasing size demands from video games, and somebody brought up the point of bandwidth as an issue as important as the size on disk. If you have to download multi-gig patches for a 100+ gig game, that's going to very quickly eat through monthly data caps.

This chart is total bullshit on past pricing. Lots of it is wrong. It's especially laughable to think that normal pc owners in 1999 were paying nearly $10,000 for a 20 GB hard drive. Let alone the cost 5 years before that. Lol
- To corroborate what you're saying, here's a Compusa ad from 1999. The desktops listed are much cheaper than the $450/GB price and come with, a whole computer around that hard drive.
  Plus on page 12, there's an 18GB drive for $300, or $16.67/GB.
- lol nobody had 20gb hard drives as “normal PC owners” in 1999. How old are you?
  
  People very much had 20GB drives that year. Sure, 8GB, 12GB, 13.6GB we’re more common capacities but any mid to high-end system that didn’t have (near enough) 20GB was bad value and drives bigger than that were available.
  
  Old enough that the first PC I built had bunches of dip switches you had to flip around so it would know what to do, depending on what you were putting in it. You ever overclock a cpu by 3Mhz before?
- I would have killed for 20Gb of space in 1999 on my personal PC. People ran with nowhere near that much space back then.
  I was also the administrator of an HP mainframe at that time, and we ran the whole business on about 5Gb, and paid big $$$ for it.
  
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  In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.
  
  Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb
  There is a difference between gigabytes and gigabits. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 8 gigabits (Gb)
  
  By late 99 you could catch 10GB drives on sale for $99, dude. If you were cool you bought two of them and ran them in a raid configuration so you had 20GB of space and your drives read/write was way faster. 20GB single drives themselves were still a few hundred, but that was it. I think my pc from like 1995 had 4GB drive in it to start with.
  Regardless of anything else, the posted numbers are obviously wack.

Maybe if you're getting refurbished drives, sure. But new drives are still more frequently around 0.02-0.05 per GB.

Someone should let Apple know
- GroundskeeperWilly.gif
  “Tim Cook hears you, Tim Cook don’t care.”

It's nice when thing actually go down in price. We need to bring back those days.
- yes because in computer tech NO ONE was hindering, in contrast to other technologies, where profits in the billions would have been in danger

https://priceperterabyte.com/
- ~800 roubles per terabyte?! It's cheaper than some used drives! Thanks for resource.
  EDIT: MDD seems to be just repackager of used drives.

I love just straight up lying. I wish it was 1¢ per GB. Maybe the most dirt cheap Chinese off-brand that only has 1/2 of its listed capacity usable because it is a refurb labelled as new. 100€ for a 10TB is insane.
Even going higher capacity to get a lower price per GB, 10TB drives are around 300€. That is 0.03€ per GB. 20TB drives are around 525€. (These are just consumer drives too, enterprise is significantly more expensive for the MTBF ratings) Still 0.026€ per GB. Once you get into ultra high capacity, it starts going up again because of tech limitations.
- Here you can get 12TB, new, from a trusted German seller, for 129€, which is 1.075 cents per GB.
- It's lying in the other direction as well. We had a 2GB HDD on our computer in the late 90s that I am very sure did not cost thousands of dollars.
- I bought a 20TB external hard drive a year ago for 0.015 cents per GB. This was after taxes, so it was technically cheaper.
  $301.69/20,000 = 0.0150

20y ago $5? No. But also, I’m an apple guy. They fuck you on storage. But I also buy third-party devices so still, no.
- TBF, everyone fucks you on built-in storage, especially soldered SSDs that can't be upgraded, and I'm very much not an Apple guy.
- Yeah his numbers are definitely off for that era...
  Diablo 2 was released 25 years ago and it required 1GB storage... he is saying that every D2 player had a $500+ HDD lmao
  
  Yeah, we had a prebuilt without anything special in it with about 5GB storage when I played Diablo II. I don't know how much it cost, but my dad was cheap and usually bought bottom end stuff, so probably $500-800 total. There's no way the storage was the bulk of that price...

So soon it will free! Can't wait

The trouble was less dollar to space in the past as it was dollar to certain benchmarks of space.

Someone do one for the average physical size taken up by 1 GB.
When I was a kid we had a 500 MB drive that was the size of a brick and now we have microsd cards that are 1TB. Pretty wild.
- The spec exists for a 128TB SDUC card.
  There probably doesn't exists one yet, or maybe only in a lab somewhere and probably costs more than my car.
  Still, today's storage density is kinda nuts.
  Within my lifetime, we've went from 1.5MB being high-density portable storage, now you can have a 2TB thumb drive in your pocket.

I'm guessing it is based upon this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage
45 years ago the cost was 567 382,81 for a GB. Now it is 0.01 for a GB.
Although the graph is in TB.
Most likely not based on consumer hardware though.
- That data makes no sense. You can’t get a terabyte of storage for $11.

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This crazy storage inflation rate is going to kill us all. We need to halt this inflation somehow. Feds?
- Shrinkflation 7zip