Feb
17
2014

Price of a digital life

I was going through a spec for a media center machine for home and got to the point where I spec’d the hard-drives. It seemed silly to put in a 2TB drive given I already have masses of storage space. Then I thought about it and looked at the cost and realised it would be silly not to put in that much. The price has just dropped so much faster that we have found ways to use it (although we are getting better with HD videos and alike).

This got me thinking about how much space I actually have and what it would have cost at a time when we simply didn’t have this insane amount of space.

First I counted up all the digital storage I had to hand:

Device Capacity in GB
CSK System 128
CSK Media 1000
CSK Temp 320
CSK Data 250
CSK Data Backup 250
Destiny System 1000
Destiny Backup 1000
NAS 8000
Media Center System 120
Media Center Video 2000
Tablet Main 64
Tablet SD 32
HTC One 32
HTC One Mini 16
Apple Powerbook G4 80
Memory Stick 8
Camera SD 2
Camera SD 2
Camera SD 0.5
Camera SD 0.5
Camera SD 0.5
Total 14305.5 GB

Then I looked into what that amount of storage (done in price per GB, not like for like) would have cost over the previous decade. Unfortunately I could only find prices in dollars so I looked up conversation rates at the time of the price which gave me the following data:

Year Cost in GBP
2000 £174,519
2001 £69,965
2002 £43,460
2003 £22,176
2004 £15,254
2005 £5,962
2006 £3,900
2007 £2,862
2008 £1,971
2009 £609

For real fun I then looked up the cost for 1981 using Apple hardware (with a cost of $700 per megabyte). I had to assume the exchange rate of 0.6 as I could not find the numbers. All of that came to £6,152,509,440. So by 1981 prices I have over 6000 million pounds worth of storage sat taking up photos and films…

By today’s prices all this comes to £436. Now that is progress.

References: Prices 1, Prices 2 and Currency conversion

One comment

  1. Shaun Forsyth says:

    You have listed your media centre storage, from what I remember you haven’t purchased this yet, however you say its a list of storage you have to hand.

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