For many years, one of my favorite technology newsletters has been The Harrow Report. Jeff Harrow recently made some comments about the rapidly falling price of hard drive storage, especially in terms of how the ready availability of one terabyte of storage had been sneaking up on us and had, incredibly, recently broken the $1,000 barrier.
$1,000 for 1 terabyte of storage beats the heck out of the $1,000 I spent on a 30 megabyte external hard drive for my Macinstosh SE many moons ago.
The price drops are happening so fast and furious that the $1,000 barrier has been shattered. The “cost for a terabyte” number has been falling so quickly in the last week or two that the $1,000 standard has been shattered.
From the incredibly useful DealNews.com comes the announcement of a deal that takes the price (after rebate) of one terabyte of hard drive capacity to an astonishing $400, assuming that you partner up with another “household.” Here’s the quote:
“**Western Digital 250GB IDE 8MB cache for $100 after rebate** – 9:38 am
Fry’s Outpost.com offers the Western Digital Caviar Special Edition
250GB IDE 8MB cache 7200 rpm hard drive, model no. WD2500JBRTL, for
$154.99. A $55 mail-in rebate yields a net price of $99.99, the
lowest we’ve seen by $10. Shipping starts around $5. Limit two per
household. Rebate ends October 5.
http://dealnews.com/newsdaily.html?article,73162”
It looks to be fairly easy to break the $1,000 terabyte barrier by shopping Internet bargains, and you might even be able to beat the $400 number.
Jeff Harrow’s newsletter was originally called “The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing,” and his catchphrase is “Don’t blink!” In hard drive storage, both phrases are highly appropriate.
Now, we can begin to consider the ramifications of the availability of this amount of storage at these prices.