Storage Cost Calculation

[Ian Kelly]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Abohfu venant zinkeng
<vicezik at gmail.com> wrote:
> This site was written by a person (in 2009) who had considered this amazing
> trend. He collected a lot of data about hard drive capacity and price. The
> formula he extrapolated by using the data he found is
>
> cost per gigabyte = 10-0.2502(year-1980) + 6.304
> where year is the year for which the extrapolated cost was desired. This
> formula is based on data from 1980 to 2010.

A nice illustration in the perils of extrapolation. Per the formula,
hard drives should be $0.006 per gigabyte now. I don't see anything on
newegg.com for less than $0.03 per gigabyte; the best deals appear to
be at the 2 TB level. And we're only 4 years out of the data range.

It also seems odd to quantify technical advancement in a way that is
easily affected by fluctuations in the strength of the US dollar.