2 TB for $80

The first PC hard disk that I used was in 1984 at St. Regis Paper Corporation where I was hired to teach technology to executives. I taught PC basics, database, graphics, and advanced Spreed Sheet to men in suits.

The hard disk was on one of the first IBM XTs to be released. The capacity was 5 megs and it cost around $1,500. When it burned out a year later, the replacement disk was $1,200. Before that, I carried around a box of 5-1/4 inch floppies. I copied all of my work floppies and my own personal collection of software onto that disk and it was less than half full. I was amazed.

Today, you can buy a 2-Tera-byte disk, 400,000 times bigger for $80. That’s 0.00000004¢ per byte. The 1984 hard disk cost 0.24¢ per byte.

This trend will only make bigger drives cheaper. The fact that Dell is dumping 2TB drives means that cheaper larger drives are in the pipeline. Soon 10TB drives will go for under $100 and not long after that, there will be portable 100TB drives – and so on.

One wonders what people will put on these drives. The Library of Congress is perhaps 5,000TB. There are other archives out there. A 100TB drive can contain 3.3 million songs. It can hold 150,000 movies. This is more than we can handle.

That is not to say that these drives will not be filled up as fast as the 200 gig drive you have now. In the future there will be applications that need all of that storage and the economics of the situation will force people to invest in PETA Byte drives, which will cost about $20.

If you buy this drive it should be good for a few years at least. Since it is a USB drive it will outlive your PC and you can move it to the new one without any problems. By the time it starts to get overly full of movies, graphics, songs and other crap you can copy it onto your $20 Peta-byte drive.

I have a PC in the basement with 4TB of storage, mostly full. I have no idea how the drives filled up so fast. I think Mad-Men and X-Files had something to do with it.

IOMEGA Dell Daily Deal – 2 TB USB 2.0 Prestige Desktop External Hard Drive : Storage, Drives & Media | Dell.