Cost of 1 gigabyte of storage over time - eviltoast
  • Lucy :3@feddit.org
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    20 days ago

    So 10€ for a Terrabyte? How? You can’t compare mass-discounted stuff, like cloud, which additionally uses your data for tracking etc., to generate more money, with the consumer focused, single-item storage common a few years ago.

  • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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    20 days ago

    This chart is total bullshit on past pricing. Lots of it is wrong. It’s especially laughable to think that normal pc owners in 1999 were paying nearly $10,000 for a 20 GB hard drive. Let alone the cost 5 years before that. Lol

    • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      To corroborate what you’re saying, here’s a Compusa ad from 1999. The desktops listed are much cheaper than the $450/GB price and come with, a whole computer around that hard drive.

      Plus on page 12, there’s an 18GB drive for $300, or $16.67/GB.

      • quink@lemmy.ml
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        20 days ago

        People very much had 20GB drives that year. Sure, 8GB, 12GB, 13.6GB we’re more common capacities but any mid to high-end system that didn’t have (near enough) 20GB was bad value and drives bigger than that were available.

        • Psythik@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          I’m sure they existed but only on high-end PCs. 20GB drives didn’t become the norm for another two years. I remember; I was there.

          • quink@lemmy.ml
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            20 days ago

            I replied to a post saying that nobody had a 20GB system. Sure it was more of a mid to high-end thing, but very much far from nobody.

            And I was there too, the low end cheapo PC I got that year had 12GB.

            https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf/PC_World_9912_December_1999.pdf

            And by 2001 that 12GB got an 80GB companion. Sure, 20GB was some low-end baseline maybe, but I had 12+80 by that year and it was in no way unusual.

            Edit: and just checked the Wayback Machine for the local computer shop. The cheapest Celerons had 40GB. In 2001.

            • tyler@programming.dev
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              19 days ago

              I said no “normal pc owners”. Normal pc owners don’t have high end systems. I didn’t say “nobody”.

              2 years in the late 90s early 2000s was a millennia. You can’t compare 99 to 01 in any manner.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        20 days ago

        Old enough that the first PC I built had bunches of dip switches you had to flip around so it would know what to do, depending on what you were putting in it. You ever overclock a cpu by 3Mhz before?

    • mkhopper@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      I would have killed for 20Gb of space in 1999 on my personal PC. People ran with nowhere near that much space back then.

      I was also the administrator of an HP mainframe at that time, and we ran the whole business on about 5Gb, and paid big $$$ for it.

      • aard@kyu.de
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        20 days ago

        In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.

      • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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        20 days ago

        By late 99 you could catch 10GB drives on sale for $99, dude. If you were cool you bought two of them and ran them in a raid configuration so you had 20GB of space and your drives read/write was way faster. 20GB single drives themselves were still a few hundred, but that was it. I think my pc from like 1995 had 4GB drive in it to start with.

        Regardless of anything else, the posted numbers are obviously wack.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

        There is a difference between gigabytes and gigabits. 1 gigabyte (GB) = 8 gigabits (Gb)

        • Cavemanfreak@lemm.ee
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          20 days ago

          Did you mean 20GB? Cause 20Gb = 2.5Gb

          The irony… Nobody talks about bits when it comes to storage, it’s basically only used for transfer speeds. So it should be pretty easy to infer by the context.

        • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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          20 days ago

          Yes, and I think in the context, that is implied. I’m not a cable internet provider advertising “50 Mb” speeds and confusing people when they only get like 6MB.

    • TruthFinder@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      yes because in computer tech NO ONE was hindering, in contrast to other technologies, where profits in the billions would have been in danger

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      20 days ago

      ~800 roubles per terabyte?! It’s cheaper than some used drives! Thanks for resource.

      EDIT: MDD seems to be just repackager of used drives.

  • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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    20 days ago

    I love just straight up lying. I wish it was 1¢ per GB. Maybe the most dirt cheap Chinese off-brand that only has 1/2 of its listed capacity usable because it is a refurb labelled as new. 100€ for a 10TB is insane.

    Even going higher capacity to get a lower price per GB, 10TB drives are around 300€. That is 0.03€ per GB. 20TB drives are around 525€. (These are just consumer drives too, enterprise is significantly more expensive for the MTBF ratings) Still 0.026€ per GB. Once you get into ultra high capacity, it starts going up again because of tech limitations.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      20 days ago

      It’s lying in the other direction as well. We had a 2GB HDD on our computer in the late 90s that I am very sure did not cost thousands of dollars.

    • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      I bought a 20TB external hard drive a year ago for 0.015 cents per GB. This was after taxes, so it was technically cheaper.

      $301.69/20,000 = 0.0150

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    20 days ago

    20y ago $5? No. But also, I’m an apple guy. They fuck you on storage. But I also buy third-party devices so still, no.

    • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      TBF, everyone fucks you on built-in storage, especially soldered SSDs that can’t be upgraded, and I’m very much not an Apple guy.

    • Krono@lemmy.today
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      20 days ago

      Yeah his numbers are definitely off for that era…

      Diablo 2 was released 25 years ago and it required 1GB storage… he is saying that every D2 player had a $500+ HDD lmao

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        18 days ago

        Yeah, we had a prebuilt without anything special in it with about 5GB storage when I played Diablo II. I don’t know how much it cost, but my dad was cheap and usually bought bottom end stuff, so probably $500-800 total. There’s no way the storage was the bulk of that price…

  • Gurei@sh.itjust.works
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    19 days ago

    The trouble was less dollar to space in the past as it was dollar to certain benchmarks of space.

  • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    Someone do one for the average physical size taken up by 1 GB.

    When I was a kid we had a 500 MB drive that was the size of a brick and now we have microsd cards that are 1TB. Pretty wild.

    • The spec exists for a 128TB SDUC card.
      There probably doesn’t exists one yet, or maybe only in a lab somewhere and probably costs more than my car.
      Still, today’s storage density is kinda nuts.
      Within my lifetime, we’ve went from 1.5MB being high-density portable storage, now you can have a 2TB thumb drive in your pocket.

  • nexguy@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    This crazy storage inflation rate is going to kill us all. We need to halt this inflation somehow. Feds?