Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte

Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.

This is old news.

[Faggot]

Disreputable dealers have had 120GB for $110 for months now. FP, btw.

Perspective...

[Yoda2]

1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year. For years, hard disk drives were confined to mainframe and minicomputer installations. Vast "disk farms" of giant 14- and 8-inch drives costing tens of thousands of dollars each whirred away in the air conditioned isolation of corporate data centers.

Oh oh, here come the old-timers

[jackjumper]

"$500 for the fantastically large 10MB models"?!?

I once paid $1000 for a 100K floppy drive!

(For my fantastically advanced TRS-80 Model III)

So there!

Yeah, great

[Anonymous Coward]

$120 for 120GB. That's lovely, but what about reliability? Where did that go?

I've been there.

[watchmaker1]

June, 1987. Graduated from high school, got a huge stack of cash as gifts.

Bought an Atari SH204 20meg hard drive for my beloved 520ST, $985.

Inside was the circuitry to make the atari interface speak MFM/RLL, and a full height 5.25" Rodime 20meg hard drive. 65ms seek time.

If I've done my math right, that's $50,432 per gig.

Those were the days

[mmoncur]

Wow, this is amazing if you've been around for a while.

My first hard drive was 105MB (that's mega, not giga) and cost $600. Of course, that included the SCSI interface for the Atari ST I was hooking it to.

The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?

Prices have dropped - speed almost the same

[teutonic_leech]

Well yes, the prices have dropped immensly indeed - however it might be worth considering that the basic concept of physical storage has not changed a bit. We are able to squeeze more bits into each square millimeter, but access speed has maybe changed by a factor of 50 or so (I'm guessing here, so please correct me). At the same time, processor speeds have aptly doubled in speed every 18 months or so.
I do appreciate cheap mass storage on my desktop, don't get me wrong, but I really long for things like static memory or holographic storage devices. And the use of spinning copper disks is not exactly power efficient either - so on the laptop front, new storage technologies could make a big difference.

$1/TB?

[SuperDuG]

What the? Why on earth would you need that much harddrive spacee to justify $1/TB??

Attention: Please Stand Up, Power Computer Down and Walk Away. Thank You.

Even if you ripped DVD's into VOB's ... you'd still need to rip over 100 to justify even 1 TB, and who the hell rips to just vob, that's like ripping to wav with a CD, you just don't do it.

Even with 4.7 gig DVD Burners, the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space (like a TiVO that can record 100 channels at the same time??)

Lets face it, the mp3 and other multimedia files has justified multi gig harddrives. Plus games that take up 600 megs a pop aren't exactly hurting the old cause. There's going to need to be justification for multi TB drives if they ever want to sell, well ... duh :-)

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Re:Perspective...

[PD]

That's what it would take for them to be reliable. Is it just me, or is everyone finding that out of 10 disks they pick up, about 8 of them won't even format properly?

Re:wow man

[Hirsto]

Damn! I remember when they were $250 a MB, course this was when a MB was 1024KB and not 1000MB. Ah, the magic of marketing!

First Hard Drive

[RetroGeek]

The first hard drive I bought cost me $500.

It was a 10 MByte (yes, that's mega) Seagate. Full height 5 1/4 (hint, a CD drive is half height).

I partitioned it into 4 drives:
C: 1M - DOS (V 2.0 !)
D: 4M - Applications
E: 4M - Data
F: 1M - Testing

Mind you after struggling with two 5 1/4 floppy drives, this was heaven.

I still have it, after all, where could I possibly sell it?

What about regular retail stores?

[nolife]

Retail stores are a very good place for HD's. You will often find BestBuy/CompUSA/Staples/CircuitCity/OfficeMax etc will have lower prices on HD's then what is at pricewatch, local computer stores, and even regional computer expos. More then likely you get a retail drive in a box with full warranty (mainly 1 year now) and maybe even a UDMA cable and 5.25 adapters. Most mail ordered I've seen are OEM and 30 days at best. CDRW's are the same way.

Sometimes you may have to deal with a rebate to get the good deal but at least one of the above retailers has one good deal a week. Not sure if SalesCircular [salescircular.com] covers all areas of the US but it is a good place to scope out retailers sale prices for a week.

This would truly be great

[ACNeal]

This would be even better news if it related to the smaller hard drives. I would love to be able to spend $10 for a 10 gig drive, or $40 for a 40 gig drive.

I have no use for super huge drives, but super cheap drives would always come in handy.

My first hard drive

[jlower]

Since everyone else is giving away their age by telling how big their first drive was and how much it cost, so will I. I'll never forget it...

10MB Techmar with a serial interface - $2000. This was ~1984 and I was damn glad to have it!

Re:Perspective...

[John Harrison]

At the Gates Building (yes, it is that Gates) home of the Stanford CS department they had an interesting display near the entrance. It was a platter from the first hard drive the university ever owned. It was part of a card catalog system at Green Library. It is huge. If I remember correctly it was about 4 feet in diameter and an inch thick of solid metal. There was a large gouge in it where they had a head crash once. I can't remember how much it stored (7 megabytes sticks in my head for some reason) by the density was very low. The plaque next to it said that it wasn't very reliable and generated lots of heat.

i dunno about overall stats, but heres mine

[clarkc3]

I have a bunch of computers running in my basement running random things and testing out network stuff - so I've had quite a few to test with Here's my take on it:

Drives I own made from 1992-1997: 6
Number of those that went bad: 2

Drives I own made from 1998-2002: 4 Number of those that went bad: 2*

* - a 3rd developed a chunk of bad sectors but still works fine

Re:Perspective...

[slipgun]

That's what it would take for them to be reliable. Is it just me, or is everyone finding that out of 10 disks they pick up, about 8 of them won't even format properly?

Not quite that bad, but certainly at least a third of the disks I buy won't format. Never mind, shouldn't be much longer before I'm exclusively using CDs to boot.

Re:Those were the days

[spongman]

the first hard drive i ever used was about 7Mb. It was connected to an Acorn BBC-B with a weird interface that made the disk look like 70 floppy-sized partitions that you could switch between using a custom command. I think that was around 1988.

Re:$1/TB?

[Nemith]

What the? Why on earth would you need that much harddrive spacee to justify $1/TB??

I totaly agree, actualy 640K is enough for anybody.

Lets face it, we will store more and more information in the future. Our divx rips will be higher quality, 6.1 surround. Our mp3/oggs will be 6.1 sound ripped fro sacd's or audio dvds.

It has been a growing trend that as time progreses so does storage capacities and if this continues we will have multi-TB drives.

Talk to a man 10 or even 5 years ago about getting a 100-gigabyte drive and they'll think your nuts! Expecially for $1/GB!

My $.02

Re:$1/TB?

[harlows_monkeys]

I remember using similar arguments in 1985 when I decided on the 10 MB Hyperdrive for my Mac, for $1500, instead of the 20 MB model for $2000.

I have no idea why anyone would ever need a TB drive at home...but if it comes down to betting, I'll bet with history, and bet they will.

Re:Now if only they were as reliable...

[lostchicken]

Would you pay twice as much for the same capacity? If so, then get two, big, cheap drives, and use mirroring RAID. You get much faster data rates, and you have backups.

Best of both worlds...

Re:Now if only they were as reliable...

[Cyno]

That's something I've learned about PC hardware. You must plan for failure. That's what RAID and backups are for. I've been buying harddrives for $1/GB for over a year now. I buy the cheapest drives I can find, 80GB Seagates, and use a few 100-200GB drives to build a RAID. The Seagates work well in swapable drive bays and have been very stable. I had one problem and it was only a missing pin, no data loss or corruption. But then again none of the data I store of them is important by itself.

The best technology today IMO is a few cheap 1394 controllers, some 1394->IDE converters and the cheapest $/GB drives you can find. Build a RAID, probably in a custom case with like 8 or 12 5.25" drive bays, use swapable IDE enclosures and have the box email you when the logs show a drive is about to fail. It might cost a little initially but it is mostly fault tolerant and dirt cheap in the long run.

Of course, it would be nice...

[uradu]

if you could pick up a 40GB drive for $40, or a 20GB for $20, without having to fool with rebates. As it is, the cost of hard drives seems to be staying at around $100, almost regardless of capacity, limiting you in just how cheap a system you can build. Right now the most expensive item in a bottom feeder system is the HD. On Newegg you can build a minimal Duron system for:

20GB HD: $69
All-in-one mobo: $51
CPU: $31
Case: $28
128MB SDRAM: $22
CD-ROM: $19
Floppy: $8

Total: $228

If that 20GB drive were $20 instead, that would be only $179. Of course, there are reasons why the drive isn't $20, I'm just lamenting.

Re:GB/buck predicted in 1980

[Anonymous Coward]

In this paper, dates were predicted for a megabyte per buck, a gigabyte per buck, and a terabyte per buck. I recall that this 1980 paper predicted a gigabyte per buck in 1999; pretty close!

Jonathan V. Post, "Quintillabit: Parameters of a Hyperlarge Database", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Very Large Databases,
Montreal, Canada, 1-3 October 1980

By the way, Post named in this article the "Shannon" = 1 mole of bits = 6.02 x 10^23 bits.

Now THAT's a big memory!

Re:Perspective...

[pclminion]

Heh. Work out the math using a 120 gig drive with those kind of costs.

To lease a 120 gig drive at the same rate per megabyte would cost $860,160,000. For the purposes of that calculation I assumed 1024 megs per gig.

Almost a BILLION dollars per year. Crazy.

Work it out a different way. I picked up a 60 gig drive for about $75. That's about one-tenth of a cent per meg. (0.122 cents to be precise). This means the cost per meg has gone down by a factor of 5.7 million.

Re:10 x $100 = TB

[GiMP]

Except you don't find $1/GB on SCSI.. especially not SCA if you plan to hot-swap. I suspect it would be much cheaper to obtain Firewire->IDE adapters which would allow you to hot-swap.

Of course, Firewire1 isn't fast enough.. you would have to go with Firewire2 for any reasonable ammount of speed. 400Mbps

120GB * 9 = 1080GB (120GB drives are cheapest)
$170 * 9 = $1530 ($170 for a 120GB drive and firewire2 enclosure)

Each Firewire2 bus can do 800Mbps, which is 100MBps.. you would want each drive doing at least 50Mbps, requiring 5 Firewire2 controllers (and associated costs) in your machine... assuming you can FIND Firewire2 controllers (I haven't been able to, other than what is builtin to the new Apple machines). You could go with slower speeds for less money, your choice.

Of course, as the original poster said.. you can just use IDE.

Re:Perspective...

[mcelrath]

At the Fermilab Computer Center there is a display at the entrance. On a round table about 4 feet in diameter are various storage devices over the years of various density. Floppies, hard drives, zip disks, etc. Then you realize the table itself is one of those 4 foot platters from one of those ancient hard drives...

-- Bob

Re:error

[isorox]

When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.

Actually he said "Jiggawatts", quite funny now that we use giga all the time, but back in the mid 80's I guess giga- was used as much as exa- is now.

Hmm, cable connecter was about 1 foot long. At 88mph, total maximum contact time (Assuming the car didnt vanish half way through the connection - if it did less power was needed) was less then 1/100th of a second. Total power used by the car was therefore 1.21*10^9/10^2 - 12.1MJ. (1 watt is a measure of power, not energy - 1 joule per second)

With a massive capacitor you could charge the delorian off five ten-millionths of a gram of antimatter (combined with an equal ammount of matter). More importantly you could charge the delorian in a UK power socket (13A, 240V, or just over 3.1KJ/s) in less then 7 minutes.

The delorian must have needed the power all at once (understandable), and didnt have any way of storing that much charge (doubtful).

BTW 1.21GW is a lot of power to continuosly put out.

Marty was back in 1955 for a week. Even a trickle charge of 60W (1 light bulb) for the entire week would have provided 36MJ, enought to power the delorian for 1/30th of a second - 3 times longer than needed.

Incidently, in 1999, the U.S.A produced over 13 million TerraJoules in electricty - enough to power the delorian for over 300 years.

Re:it's all relative

[Anonymous Coward]

Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.

Maybe so, but only for CD quality audio. What about when 96 khz, 24-bit becomes the standard? Or even more? I'm not one of those wackos that claims to hear the difference between this a CD quality, but it is useful in some applications, especially sound editing and processing. I forget what specs SACD and DVD Audio use, but they're already more than CD quality.

Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.

Ha! What about fully uncompressed (or losslessly compressed) video? At DVD resolution, that's about 13 gigs per hour. What about HDTV resolution? That's well over 70 gigs per hour uncompressed. What about higher resolutions? What about higher color fidelity (48 bpp instead of 24)?

Man, I'm glad the world isn't completely full of self-limiting thinkers like you. You sound like that famous quote (whoever said it, Bill Gates, or not): "Nobody will ever need more than 640k." If the world only had people like you, we'd still be in the dark ages!

Re: Photo of disk platter...

[kinko]

... I took a photo of this when I visited California:

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jrm21/images/platter- lowres.jpg [waikato.ac.nz]

I put a US one dollar bill on the display case for size comparison ;) There is also a clipping from a newspaper of the time saying how Stanford was suing over warranty issues (such has high unavailability) but it doesn't say what the outcome was...

Home video, maybe?

[2nd Post!]

While a DVD may only be on the order of gigabytes, the raw video used to make that DVD is going to be on the order of hundreds of gigabytes, and what with Apple's push for iLife (iMovie3, iDVD3), I don't think there's any problems at all with sucking up 200gb in making a home movie masterpiece.

Now imagine when Apple releases the home consumer version of Shake (for compositing and SFX) or Logic Audio (for home music composing), and it's easy to imagine the need for more storage. The movies you make, the raw footage, the intermediate files, etc.

Re:Unreliable floppy disks

[Jucius Maximus]

"I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable."

True. If you look at older discs (1990s era) the two halves of plastic are glued all the way around. The 'new' floppies are only glued in the corners so lint, grease, etc can get in and wreck them more easily.

Re:Of course, it would be nice...

[ParallelJoe]

The day after Thanksgiving I went to Best Buy at 5:45 am to pick up a $40 DVD player as a Christmas present for my mother. (as an aside, when she opened it I discovered it was also a Karoke machine!) While I was there I noticed they had a 75G 7200 hard drive for $50. And it included a 256 PC133 stick fo memory. I grabbed it. MS Keyboard $5. MS optical mouse $5. Read/Write CD drive $9.99. 150 CDRs - free. All after rebate of course but jeeze. I wasn't even looking to build a computer. I had 8 already! So I got home went to pricewatch and found a barebones with case, floppy , a 256M PC133 stick, Athlon 1.33 and integrated 32M video for $145. Do you know what the kicker is? This new box was now the fastest one in the house. So who gets it? The kids (6 & 7 yrs) of course!