The Price of Memory – Massive Massive Deflation

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When I received my first computer back in the 90’s I was staggered by the sheer amount of information it can hold. That was of course only a few megabytes back then and when I eventually purchased another computer a year or two ago I was staggered once again at having a whopping terabyte of space to myself, when my last PC just had a few gigabytes to its name. This really got me thinking about the incredible rate at which memory size has increased. Well thankfully the team at Jolt have put together a handy guide on the growth of not only hard drive storage but that of RAM too. Not only have they looked at the storage capacity of these drives. released every year, but have worked out the comparative price per terabyte for hard drives and price per gigabyte of RAM.

For instance, in 1985 a terabyte of storage would have cost you about the same price as a custom-built Boeing-747 compared to today where you can get one for the same price as a meal out. Similarly, a gigabyte of RAM in 1985 would have cost you the same as a penthouse apartment in New York City, whereas today you can get a gigabyte for just about the same price as cup of coffee, (although why you would ever need a gigabyte of Ram in 1985 is beyond me).

What this leads me to wonder is exactly where the future holds, according to one study the space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months, meaning that within the next year we could infarct see the price of a terabyte reach £10. The real question is how long this exponential growth can last for. It’s also worth considering where SSD’s fall into this as people sacrifice space for lighting fast speeds

So, check out the graphic below and see just how far technology has progressed over the past three decades.

Gigabyte of Ram Memory

Gigabyte of Ram Memory costs over the years

 

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