it cost the same to make, package and handle. It didn't matter if the drive held 5 MB or 128 MB. At some point the basic cost of manufacturing a drive unit (plus profit margin) caused the (per unit) price to stabilize. During this time the unit cost rapidly decreased while the amount of data which could be stored increased.Īll good things must end. which allowed the per unit price to drop. As the PC market exploded, so did the quantity of hard drives. The R&D and manufacturing cost had to be spread across the few people willing to fork out for drives that frequently failed with a short period of time. There were not a lot of personal systems and businesses were not yet buying many either (these were still the days of Mini/Mainframes with dumb terminals). Back in 1980, I would need to pay about $5000 (not inflation adjusted) for a 5 MB HDD unit. One is related to the basic cost of a hard drive unit. It is interesting to note that two shifts took place. Very nice! I think that the dramatic price decrease coincides with the quantity of these devices manufactured as well as the density which can be achieved. Of course hard drives were also attached to mainframes and only years earlier they were the size of washing machines with platters inside a clear plastic housing that looked like mom's Tupperware for carrying a cake. 35 years ago, there were IBM PCs running Intel 8088 at 4.77MHz and a full height 5-1/4" hard drive held 5MB of data and cost north of $3000. Not only were there a tiny fraction of the current number of PCs, but if you had a hard drive in it at all, you were some kind of computer god with money to burn. Read/Write heads got smaller, then closer to the disk, making the tracks smaller, then the polarity was switched to "vertical" bits, and the number of platters and quality of the magnetic substrate has improved. The primary driver in the cost/GB is technological innovations, with a secondary being cost reductions in manufacturing due to offshore labor and improved manufacturing yields.īit density have increased almost in line with Moore's Law. Note that the graph is logarithmic, so that roughly linear decline is actually exponential. Adjusted for the consumer price index (CPI-U), $100 today is equivalent to $35 in 1980, so I'm curious if the price drop per unit storage isn't even more impressive if these prices haven't been adjusted for inflation.
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