Hard Drive Prices
My hard drive is full again, but I feel like
they're more expensive than they should be. I bought a new 300 GB drive two
years ago for about $150, and now I can get a 300 GB drive for about
$80.
That's not enough of a price drop for me. I like to double my capacity every time I buy a new drive, so I can back up my old one and still have lots of room to spare. But the 600 GB drives are more like $300 -- way more than I want to spend. (Always go for the lowest dollars per megabyte, right?)
I felt like hard drive prices used to drop much faster, so I made a little graph of prices since 1981.
That's dollars per megabyte, in log scale. Back in 1981, Apple sold a 5 megabyte drive for $3500. Prices dropped steadily while capacities increased -- especially in the late 1990s, when prices dropped by a factor of 100 in 5 years. Nice!
Things have slowed down a lot, dropping only by a factor of 3 in the past three years.
OK, that's not all that slow. But I expect better.
That's not enough of a price drop for me. I like to double my capacity every time I buy a new drive, so I can back up my old one and still have lots of room to spare. But the 600 GB drives are more like $300 -- way more than I want to spend. (Always go for the lowest dollars per megabyte, right?)
I felt like hard drive prices used to drop much faster, so I made a little graph of prices since 1981.
That's dollars per megabyte, in log scale. Back in 1981, Apple sold a 5 megabyte drive for $3500. Prices dropped steadily while capacities increased -- especially in the late 1990s, when prices dropped by a factor of 100 in 5 years. Nice!
Things have slowed down a lot, dropping only by a factor of 3 in the past three years.
OK, that's not all that slow. But I expect better.
Filed Fri - December
1, 2006, 03:10 PM in
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