IPcentral Weblog
  The DACA Blog

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

 
Amazing Gains in Digital Storage Technology
(previous | next)
 

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal has a fun piece in today's paper about the amazing gains that have been made in the field of digital storage technology. He notes that we reached another amazing milestone in the computing business with the annoucement of several terabyte-capacity disk drives from Hitachi, Seagate and others. (I saw some of these at CES this year. Very cool stuff.) The last time we reached a major storage milestone like this, he points out, was back in 1991 when we crossed the gigabyte threshold.

I'll never forget when those first 1-gig drives came out how I thought to myself "Geez, who in the hell would ever need that much capacity?" What an idiot I was. Of course, I could not have envisioned the explosion of so much downloadable digital content, the rise of digital photography / camcorders, and the coming of storable HD video. I recently maxed out an old 100-gig hard drive on a PC at my house and started stacking external hard drives to store all my digital content. And my wife and I have been holding off on upgrading to an HD camcorder because we fear we don't have enough storage space for all the home movies of the kids.

But hopefully that will now change for me. As Gomes points out, back when those old 1-gig drives where announced, they were priced in the $2000 range. By contrast, the new 1-terabyte drives are hitting the market at just $400 bucks. This means that, on a cost-per-byte basis, the old 1-gig models were 5,000 times as expensive as the newer models.

You gotta love capitalism!

posted by Adam Thierer @ 4:09 PM | Generic Rant , Innovation

Share |

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly

Post a Comment:





 
Blog Main
RSS Feed  
Recent Posts
  EFF-PFF Amicus Brief in Schwarzenegger v. EMA Supreme Court Videogame Violence Case
New OECD Study Finds That Improved IPR Protections Benefit Developing Countries
Hubris, Cowardice, File-sharing, and TechDirt
iPhones, DRM, and Doom-Mongers
"Rogue Archivist" Carl Malamud On How to Fix Gov2.0
Coping with Information Overload: Thoughts on Hamlet's BlackBerry by William Powers
How Many Times Has Michael "Dr. Doom" Copps Forecast an Internet Apocalypse?
Google / Verizon Proposal May Be Important Compromise, But Regulatory Trajectory Concerns Many
Two Schools of Internet Pessimism
GAO: Wireless Prices Plummeting; Public Knowledge: We Must Regulate!
Archives by Month
  September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
  - (see all)
Archives by Topic
  - A La Carte
- Add category
- Advertising & Marketing
- Antitrust & Competition Policy
- Appleplectics
- Books & Book Reviews
- Broadband
- Cable
- Campaign Finance Law
- Capitalism
- Capitol Hill
- China
- Commons
- Communications
- Copyright
- Cutting the Video Cord
- Cyber-Security
- DACA
- Digital Americas
- Digital Europe
- Digital Europe 2006
- Digital TV
- E-commerce
- e-Government & Transparency
- Economics
- Education
- Electricity
- Energy
- Events
- Exaflood
- Free Speech
- Gambling
- General
- Generic Rant
- Global Innovation
- Googlephobia
- Googlephobia
- Human Capital
- Innovation
- Intermediary Deputization & Section 230
- Internet
- Internet Governance
- Internet TV
- Interoperability
- IP
- Local Franchising
- Mass Media
- Media Regulation
- Monetary Policy
- Municipal Ownership
- Net Neutrality
- Neutrality
- Non-PFF Podcasts
- Ongoing Series
- Online Safety & Parental Controls
- Open Source
- PFF
- PFF Podcasts
- Philosophy / Cyber-Libertarianism
- Privacy
- Privacy Solutions
- Regulation
- Search
- Security
- Software
- Space
- Spectrum
- Sports
- State Policy
- Supreme Court
- Taxes
- The FCC
- The FTC
- The News Frontier
- Think Tanks
- Trade
- Trademark
- Universal Service
- Video Games & Virtual Worlds
- VoIP
- What We're Reading
- Wireless
- Wireline
Archives by Author
PFF Blogosphere Archives
We welcome comments by email - look for a link to the author's email address in the byline of each post. Please let us know if we may publish your remarks.
 










The Progress & Freedom Foundation