This website was inspired by an advertisement for in the August 2004 issue of Australian Personal Computer Magazine. One of the magazines regular advertisers replaced their normal ad with their ad from 2001. Quite a lot of interest was created. People were fascinated by how much prices had fallen and speeds and sizes increased in just 3 years. Overclockers Australia ran a story about it inviting their readers send in very old advertisements to show how much things had changed in just a decade or so.
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for larger view)
That ad and a May
2005 Slashdot article and its subsequent discussing about new
high density platters for hard disks started me thinking about
some questions. Questions like when should we expect 1 gig 3.5
hard disks to be readily available and how much we could expect
them to cost when they become available. To make a reasonably
accurate educated guess I needed have some historical price and
size data for hard disks going back long enough to be able to
establish clear trends. With this in mind I turned to eBay
and won an auction for back issues of Australian Personal Computer
Magazine (APC) dating back to 1992. Selecting the March and
September issues as a representation of prices for each half year
and I then looked at all that advertisements stated both the price
and capacity of hard disks. By using advertisements of the time,
it can be reasonably assumed that the drive was readily available
and we get a good picture of its street price. By creating data
using the cheapest price of any particular drive size advertised,
I was able to determine the size and price point of hard drives
over the last 13 years. I used that data to determine the which
drive was the largest available at the time as well as the best
cost per Megabyte of each half year. From that data I was able to
make projections on what we might expect in the near future.
7th March 2008
I have updated the annual hard disk and flash price charts. This year I also created a page comparing the price improvements of flash with hard drives to see if we can get some indication of when, if ever, that flash will overtake hard disks as the most economical method of on-line storage.
3rd December 2007
I did a quick study on software bloat to get an idea of whether the problem is real or mostly imagined.
17th November 2007
An article on the interesting observation that hard disks are get larger at a quicker rate than they get faster.
26th July 2006
I came across an interesting problem with the Windows DNS suffix feature.
15th July 2006
I'll keeping a page up o date on which drive size currently represents the best bang for buck.
1st May 2006
I went looking for data in how much more power efficient flash drives were than hard disks but I wasn't able to find anything suitable.
Hence, I made my own page on the power usage of flash.
26th April 2006
Some helpful visitors have suggested I use my data to show what size hard disk can be purchased for US $250 over the last dozen years. Here is the result, the $250 hard disk.
7th April 2006
The figures for March 2006 are in and here is the analysis on the latest figures.
20th December 2005
I had a good laugh at some the the old editorials in my pile of APC magazines. I thought I'd share the funniest in this piece I called predicting the future.
12th November
Here is my analysis on 3.5 inch IDE hard drives.
Here is a similar analysis with RAM
And finally, the same deal with flash memory. Comparing flash memory with hard drives gives some interesting projections for the future.
Also check out my blog page for non computer trend related stuff.