What I actually did was to pay $199 for a Western Digital “MyBook” 500 Gb external hard drive. While comparing hard drive prices, however, I stopped a moment to consider how incredibly far hard drive prices have fallen over the years. I concluded that I was getting a windfall no matter what modern hard drive I bought. Why? Because my benchmark is 1990, when I bought my first external hard drive.
In 1988, I was the proud owner of a Mac Plus (Mac Plus is now 20 years old. See here [1] and here [2]) By 1990, I was desperate for more memory. For $400, I purchased a 40 Mb (as in “mega”) external hard drive. Its storage capacity seemed as massive to me as the big noisy metal box that housed it.
Here’s what’s amazing. The fast little MyBook drive I just bought has the capacity of 12,500 external drives of the type I bought in 1990. My new MyBook is also much faster and reliable than my 1990 drive, even though it’s half the size. If I had purchased the same storage capacity of my new MyBook by buying 12,500 of those 1990 drives, it would have cost me $5,000,000. Where would I have put them? They would have completely filled four rooms measuring 10’ x 10’ x 8’.
What a deal, then, to buy a hard drive nowadays, especially for those of us who had to pay those big prices for slow machines only 17 years ago.
Now, of course, I can be profligate in my use of hard disk space. For instance, I try to go paperless at home, by scanning everything that enters the house in paper form. Paper photos are long gone. More than 16,000 images (many of my two daughters) occupy more than 14 Gb of my hard drive. How many shoe boxes would all of those photos occupied, I wonder? Too many. To process that many photos the traditional way would have cost me much more than the cost of developing 16,000 photos chemically (about $3,000 at Walgreens – 19 cents each). [3] That’s because I delete at least half of the photos I take.
The real memory hog is video, of course, where a compressed HD video can eat up memory at a rate of more than 11 Gb per hour of video. [4] Ergo, the new hard drive. Anyone who dabbles in digital video quickly discovers this.
While checking around to verify a few things for this article, I encountered these amazing statistics [5] regarding the amount of storage media produced since 1992:
Between 1992 and 2003, roughly 1.5 billon drives shipped, capable of holding 41,400 exabytes, according to the “How Much Information?” [6]study from the University of California at Berkeley. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Five exabytes would be enough to store all human speech since the dawn of time through 2002, according to the study.
These stats are from an article dated September 2006, but I’m sure that the amount of storage capacity has grown immensely, even in the past six months. The history of hard drives is truly an amazing story. For more, see here [7] or here [8] or here [9].
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