1 Terabyte of Storage for $148?
November 21st, 2008I just checked my Amazon affiliate stats and someone bought a 1TB external drive for $148.
I’m just floored by this.
In 2000, the CEO of the company that I worked for told me to draw up plans to put 1TB of storage on the network. (In 2000, tera-scale infrastructure was a relatively big deal.) I came up with three options: Minimum, Mid-range, Optimum.
The differences involved various levels of failover protection.
Anyway, the minimum number was $14,000 back then. They wound up not doing it.
And now… $148 does the trick. That’s not a network enabled part, but you get the point.
What will 1TB cost a year from now? $19.99? Don’t breathe the air or drink the water and (for people in the U.S.) just try to forget the one about the superbugs in your store bought meat. But, by jeepers, at least the technocrack is cheap!
Two orders of magnitude cheaper in 8 years? Yeah, sounds about right.
I still remember going over to my friend’s house in 1992 when he ordered a 1 gigabyte hard drive from Computer Shopper magazine. Y’know, picked up the phone, talked to a customer service operator, read off the item number from the catalog page, etc.
“Holy crap! One gig-a-byte! You’ll NEVER fill that up!” Between the drive and the SCSI controller to go with it, it cost around $1k, which was a couple month’s wages at the part-time job he worked.
And now, sales goons hand out 4GB flash drives at conferences, for “free”, or for five minutes of your time to listen to their inane sales pitches; and you can buy gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, in whatever format and interface you want, in the check-out line at Wal-Mart for, oh, twenty or thirty bucks.
Thank you, PC and electronics industry, for sucking up so much of my time and hard-earned money over the past two decades. 🙂