Storage Costs Over Time

A mate pointed me to this history of the costs of 1 GB of storage.

I remember a tech staff advising our office manager (late 1980’s) to only get the 10MB HDD model PC since he would never ever need the 20MB model. (note the data in the first link only goes to 2009, the second to 2014)

https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte

https://mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte-update

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Truely, we are living in the digital age. The capacity to store all of everything in our lives for a few cents?

If only over the same time, our digitally connected houses had shown the same relative improvement in purchase cost per square metre! :wink:

Anyone else feeling left out of the digital revolution?

P.S.
I’m almost ashamed to suggest that if our house is lost in a bushfire, I’d be more concerned about loosing the stored digital content than the roof over our heads! :flushed:

Backup, backup, backup!

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When we bought our first business PC in the 1980’s, it had a 10MB HDD, and when it failed, the smallest available was 20MB and which cost some hundreds of dolars.

After we bought some existing internet kiosks in 2001 which were built with 2GB HDD, the smallest replacement was then 20GB thus requiring them to be partitioned as the rubbish program which ran under Windows NT 3.1 could not handle the HDD size.

And one can buy a 4TB SSD drive today for far less than the price of that 20MB replacement in the 1980’s, even without allowing for inflation which is around 130% over that period, so 1MB of storage has reduced by a factor of around 5 million after allowing for inflation

And of course, today’s drives are vastly superior in every aspect to the old clunkers.

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What I find amazing is they can fit 256GB+ onto a chip the size of an almond flake (nano SD) for not much money. 256GB would possibly be big enough to capture all the important things in one’s life.

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2TB was for quite a while the maximum that Windows could access due to the limitations of the FAT32 format.

Since we’re on the subject, does anyone know if long file names (greater than 8.3) are still ‘faked’, or if modern versions of Windows have dropped the 8.3 entirely?

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See the topic Short File Names and Long File Names in MS Windows

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