Data Storage Costs Over Time

The manufacturing and marketing efficiencies that drive the pricing of hard drives seems to have changed over time.

Data storage costs over time.

Here is a look at how data storage has changed over the last six decades. This gives us a benchmark price for raw hdd storage today. According to one infographic the average cost of storing a single tb of file data is 3 351 a year. Improvements within the internet such as continuously lowering the cost of storage capacity and improved bandwidth have made it more economical for individuals and businesses to use the cloud for data storage.

The data on this chart was sourced from the current price of these drives on amazon. But while storage hardware is becoming more affordable the cost of file storage with all the associated costs continues to be a burden. The cloud offers essentially an infinite amount of data. Data storage then and now as the size of storage drives shrink capacity increases dramatically.

The list price for the 3 tb barracuda drive is 99 99 making the price per gb 0 033. Over the past 50 years data storage development has blown past barrier after barrier to give us denser higher capacity hard drives and flash storage at ever cheaper costs. There is a very strong exponential correlation in space cost ratio r 0 9916. The internet made the cloud available as a service.

A dramatic drop in storage and associated data transfer costs would enable smaller companies to run analysis on large data sets and move more data to the cloud. Storage capacity is billed in units of the average daily amount of data stored in gigabytes gb over a monthly period. For example if you consistently used 10 gb of storage for the first half of the month and none for the second half of the month you would be billed for your average usage of 5 gb of storage. To optimize your savings choose the right combinations of storage solutions that help you reduce costs while preserving performance security and durability.

The drive models selected were consumer drives like those we typically use in our data centers. Per gb storage or the space taken by the files and network transfer or essentially the cost of downloading the files. Over the last 30 years space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months.