By Dan Brekke
Engineers at IBM have packed 11.6 billion bits of data into every square inch of hard disk, meaning that 1,450 copies of The Odyssey can be stored in the space of a thumbnail. As capacity has increased, the cost of storage has plummeted, falling nearly 400-fold in little more than a decade. The elegance of increasing capacity and decreasing cost is more than a story of magnetic-media manipulation and market forces. This tale of denser, cheaper disks is but a chapter in the ongoing saga of making more data available more widely, a station on the way from the Lascaux cave to the networked universe.
Avg. price per Mbyte (US$)
| 12
11.54
| 10
9.30
| 8
| 6 6.86
5.23
| 4
3.00
| 2
1.46
.705 .33 .179 .101 .068 .039 .027
| '88 | '89 | '90 | '91 | '92 | '93 | '94 | '95 | '96 | '97 | '98 | '99 | '00
Source: Jim Porter, Disk/Trends
| ELECTRIC WORD
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