A friend wrote asking me if a petabyte would be an affordable amount of disk storage in five years time. Blowed if I know, but in scrabbling to answer, I did find this great projection of the next twenty years of magnetic storage. It contains this graph which is based on IBM estimates of future storage capacity and price. (which I couldn’t be bothered to convert into HTML – hey, but maybe you will and sent the text to me. Updated 2004-07-11: For my birthday, Adrian Furby sent me this HTMLised. Thanks, Adrian!)
| Annual Decline | Cost for 1 GigaByte 1,000 MBytes (US Dollars) (Storage for 2 Scanned File Cabinets) |
Cost For 1 TeraByte = 1,000 Gigabytes (US Dollars) (Storage for 2,000 Scanned File Cabinets) (Holding 20 Million Scanned Letter Pages) |
||||
| 45% | Non-FC/SCSI PC Disk No Online Redundancy |
Non-FC/SCSI PC Disk Software RAID Redundancy |
SAN FC Disk FC Fabric Hardware Raid |
SCSI/FC SAN/PC Name Brand Fault Awareness Hardware Raid |
Mainframe | |
| Year | 1 X | 2 X | 4 X | 8 X | 12 X | |
| 1992 1993 1994 1995 |
1,000.00 550.00 302.50 166.80 |
1,000,000.00 550,000.00 302,500.00 166,375.00 |
2,000,000.00 1,100,000.00 605,000.00 332,750.00 |
4,000,000.00 2,200,000.00 1,210,000.00 665,500.00 |
8,000,000.00 4,400,000.00 2,420,000.00 1,331,000.00 |
12,000,000.00 6,600,000.00 3,630,000.00 1,996,500.00 |
| 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 |
91.51 50.33 27.68 15.22 8.37 |
91,506.25 50,328.44 27,680.64 15,224.35 8,373.39 |
183,012.50 100,656.88 55,361.28 30,448.70 16,746.79 |
366,025.00 201,313.75 110,722.56 60,897.41 33,493.58 |
732,050.00 402,627.50 221,445.13 121,794.82 66,987.15 |
1,098,075.00 603,941.25 332,167.69 182,692.23 100,480.73 |
| 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 |
4.61 2.53 1.39 0.77 0.42 |
4,605.37 2,532.95 1,393.12 766.22 421.42 |
9,210.73 5,065.90 2,786.25 1,532.44 842.84 |
18,421.47 10,131.81 5,572.49 3,064.87 1,685.68 |
36,842.93 20,263.61 11,144.99 6,129.74 3,371.36 |
55,264.40 30,395.42 16,717.48 9,194.61 5,057.014 |
| 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 |
0.23 0.13 0.07 0.04 0.02 |
231.78 127.48 70.11 38.56 21.21 |
463.56 254.96 140.23 77.13 42.42 |
927.12 509.92 280.45 154.25 84.84 |
1,854.25 1,019.84 560.91 308.50 169.68 |
2,781.37 1,529.75 841.36 462.75 254.51 |
As you can see, a petabyte will still cost about $70,000 in 2008. Consolation prize: a terabyte will sell for $70. Better start saving those files now!