Hard drive pricing question

[Orrex]

Back in about 1994 I seem to remember ~3 gig hard drives retailing for $300. Can this possibly be correct?

I'm not talking about sales in which the seller unjustly screws the buyer; I'm referring to straight-up legit retail purchase.


Is there a good online source for historical pricing data like this?

[Neoma]

1. 3 gig hard drives didn't exist then.

Or if there were, it'd be $1,000 easy.

[Orrex]

6. Maybe it was 97

Actually, yeah. That seems to match the timing of where I worked, where I lived.

$300 possible then?

[Systematic Chaos]

2. It would have taken until about 1997 to get 3gb for that price, according to this site.

http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

[Orrex]

8. That could be it

I know where I worked (a sub shop) when I bought it, and I know the years when I worked there, so it might have been 97, maybe around summer.

Really blew the doors off the 100MB drive I'd been using before that!

[evlbstrd]

3. I Googled "historical pricing data hard disk drives"

http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm

http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html

[Orrex]

7. Thanks

It's always better to google something than to open a discussion about it. What was I thinking?

[evlbstrd]

9. Oh!

"Is there a good online source for historical pricing data like this?"

My mistake!

[Orrex]

10. To be fair, I didn't open with that

That was the closing to a question that I hoped would result in discussion. Thanks for contributing.

[evlbstrd]

11. Sorry to be a smart ass.

It's just my nature.

It does appear that the declaration of the death of Moore's Law was premature.

[hunter]

4. 1 gig drives were huge in 1995. $600

Time flies when we're having fun!

Cool. I found a link:

http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte


Edited to add that I'm not the only one who googled!

[PoliticAverse]

5. 600 MB drives were about $550 in 1994.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-15358668.html

[HopeHoops]

12. Well, I remember when floppy drives were close to that, but that was much earlier.

It kind of freaks me out that you can get 64GB on a flash card for what amounts to squat compared to ten years ago.

[Orrex]

13. That's what always blows my mind

There are others with computer experience dating back much farther than mine, but my first PC in the early 90s was the size of a Tom Clancy hardback and had a whopping 20 megs. I have a 16gig flash drive on my desk right now, and as you note much larger storage capacity is readily available. Even Walmart sells 32gig drives.

I love it. There are other benchmark gadgets to show the advance of technology, but for me the incredible evolution of data storage shows this particular form of progress better than anything.

[HopeHoops]

14. I started with cassette tape for external storage, and then got the 13 sector Apple floppy...

..., 5 1/4", with something like 150K on it. Upgrading to 16 sectors was a major deal. It took it up to like 175K - single sided. What really amazes me is that no matter how quickly storage sizes increase, the industry always finds a way to eat most of the space. I mean, my server has 9TB of space and some of the drives are full. Then again, I'm also downloading a 24.6GB image of the center of the Milky Way that's currently estimated to take another 12 days and 10 hours to complete - whoops - just changed to 9 days and 12 hours. The estimates are really funny to watch, but it's still under 1% completed.