Check out this superb graph from Wired Magazine reposted by Carpe Diem – Chart of the day: The falling price of memory.
Fantastic illustration of how drastically storage prices have dropped in last 20 years.
Let’s look at the technology I’ve used to pass info back and forth to clients while at their office.
I got one of those really cool Iomega zip drives when I started my firm in 2002 – it was down to the point of affordable and had really huge storage. It had a whopping 250 MB storage. On one disk!
Price of that had dropped from $311 a gigabyte in about 1994 to $22 in 2001.
At that time, a USB drive was the equivalent of $8,222 per GB. Those have dropped to under a buck, $0.94, per GB.
For Iomega going from $311 to $22 per gigabyte is a 92.92% drop. For flash drives, dropping from $8,222.00 to $0.94 a GB is another 99.9886% drop.
I did some calculations using estimation and came up with a 31.51% annual drop for the zip drive over each of 7 years and 53.1% drop of the flash drive for each year over a 12 year run.
Very cool.
There’s never been a better time to be alive.