Storage Cost Calculation

[MRAB]

On 2014-09-27 15:30, Ian Kelly wrote:
> 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.
>
I once did a calculation of my own about the cost of RAM.

In 1981 the BBC Micro was released. There were 2 versions, model A with
16K and model B was 32K. The price difference was £100, so that's £100
for 16K of RAM.

Today you can get 16GB of RAM for about the same price.

If you'd wanted that much RAM 30 years ago, it would've cost you £100m!