Outpost is selling a seagate 400gb hard drive for $110. This is 27.5 cents per gig and makes a 40 gig drive worth $11. Average users won’t fill a 40 gig drive in their PC’s lifetime – that’s tens of thousands of mp3 files. I do some video editting and I have yet to fill a 60 gig drive on my laptop. (I have to clean it up from time to time, though).

I expect to be able to pick up a few 40 gig drives for under $20 soon and use my $14 usb adapter for offline storage.

Disk drive capacity has gone crazy. I remember when a 5 meg drive on my brand new XT was a huge amount of storage. When I dropped a file on it, I could almost hear the echo of all that empty space. That drive cost me $800 in 1984. That was $160,000 per gig! I was only making $18K per year then so it was a big investment.

In 1986, my friend Charlie Innusa ran PC-Rockland. He had twenty 40 meg disk drives daisy chained on a 3Com network. It cost him tens of thousands of dollars. I think that he had about 600 megs of storage – that’s less than what you can put in ten cent CD, now.