Stumbled on a stat that blew my mind about old hard drives

I was digging through some old IT trade magazines at a thrift store last weekend, and I found an article from 1991. It said the average hard drive back then cost around $200 per megabyte of storage. That really hit me hard comparing it to today where you get a terabyte for like $40. Has anyone else run into wild old tech pricing that made you stop and think?

2 comments

2 Comments

derek99428d ago

Honestly that stat really puts things in perspective, but I gotta ask - did the article mention what kind of tech they were actually using back then? Like was it all massive 5.25 inch drives with moving parts that sounded like a jet engine, or were there already smaller 3.5 inch options? Ngl I remember my uncle had a 40MB hard drive in his 486 PC and he bragged about it for years, but I always wondered what the actual cost breakdown was per gigabyte for the average consumer versus what businesses paid. Tbh the craziest part for me is realizing people paid that much for storage that would barely hold a single photo today.

grayc2728d ago

@derek994 you said "would barely hold a single photo today" and that really hits home. But I gotta push back on one thing. The 40MB drive your uncle had was already past the really crazy early days. In the late 80s and early 90s, most home PCs used 5.25 inch floppy drives for everything. Hard drives were super rare for regular people. The 40MB drives came later and by then prices had already started dropping. The real sticker shock was in the 1980s when a 10MB hard drive could cost like a thousand bucks or more. Businesses were paying even more for the big 20MB and 40MB models, like hundreds per megabyte not gigabytes.