A few people have suggested I show the trend of what size hard disk $250 US has been able to buy you. Its fun to remember back when you bought that massive 1.6 Gig drive and wondered how you would ever fill it. I don't have historical data for US pricing of hard disks but I do have Australian pricing and US to AU dollar data, so with this information I'm able to make a pretty good estimate of what size drive you could buy for about $250. You will be able to notice I have included a little bit of flexibility in the $250 figure where a particular drive is only a few dollars more. There are some cases where the most appropriate priced disk is well below the 250 mark but this is only because the next size up is a little too far over $250.
Now that we understand how the created the data was created lets have a look at the chart.
Please note the logarithmic scale.
The obvious trend has already been highlighted. From 92 to 02 you could regularly buy a hard disk with twice the capacity of one the year before for the same amount of money. After 02 the rate of doubling is reduced to every second year. This shows strong correlation to the bang per per buck data I have also collected.
The future looks good meet another doubling in two years with 750 Gig drives just announced and quite a lot of headroom left in the $250 due to the 06 drive coming in at a mere $158.
For those who want to take a closer look at the data that makes up the graph here it is: