The Amazing Decline in Memory and Disk Prices

A couple of recent purchases I've made brought to light the amazing reduction of prices for both memory and disk space.  When I purchased my Lenovo S10 a few weeks ago I decided to upgrade its memory, so I purchased a 2GB memory card for the ridiculously low price of $30.  And the net price was actually half that amount, as the manufacturer had offered a $15 rebate as well!  It seems like it wasn't so long ago that 512MB SIMM cards were in the $300 range, so over a relatively few short years we've seen nearly a two orders of magnitude difference in prices...pretty amazing stuff.

What's even more amazing is the drop in disk storage pricing.  One of our servers at Wigix needed some additional hard disk space, so I went and purchased a Seagate Barracuda 750 GB drive  for $156.  A couple of things went through my head as I made this purchase.  First off, it seems like we almost take for granted the amount of disk storage that we use.  750 GB is an absolute ton of storage.  But when I look around my home and take inventory of my DVR's, external hard drives, etc. I probably have close to 2 TB of storage myself, and even with that amount of storage I constantly scramble to look around for more disk space to store off my media files or backups.  My god...when I was in the corporate IT world 10 or 12 years ago there weren't many Fortune 500 companies with a terabyte of data across their entire enterprise, let alone in somebody's house.  And the prices are so ridiculously low now too....750 GB for $156 comes out to about 1/5th of a penny per MB. Again, going back to my corporate IT days I can recall that in the early to mid-90's we were paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 per MB....and we thought we were getting a pretty good deal back then.  A good deal?  That's a thousand times more per MB than what I'm paying now!  No wonder our EMC sales rep had such a smile on his face every time he visited our office back then.

Next up for me...a RAID-enabled NAS drive for the home...stay tuned.